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MEXICO AND ITS RECONSTRUCTION

wig-Holstein to Yucatan but the venture proved a failure. The few who remained in the country were soon absorbed into the local population. The unfortunate results discouraged further colonization en masse but in later years Germans have come individually and have adjusted themselves to Mexican conditions with success. German writers proclaim Mexico as a land well suited for a large immigration. There the colonist lives the national life without losing his love for the fatherland, his principles, and his upbringing. "Wherever in the world there are a hundred Germans, there is also a German school with the task of teaching within its walls the holy love of the fatherland and the fruitful high German kultur." "In traveling through these wide unpopulated districts of Mexico, there unconsciously comes to one the thought of the great density of population at home in Germany, where people are packed like herrings in a cask, and one cannot avoid the desire to take . . . a couple of millions of poor beings to whom light and air are denied over there and . . . put them down in the boundless, fruitful open spaces of Mexico."[1]

No detailed analysis of German investments in Mexico is available. A writer at the end of the Diaz régime estimated the total working capital invested at the equivalent of $75,000,000.[2] Germans did not enter largely into the industrial development of Mexico, except in later years in certain mining developments. Mercantile development showed their influence to a greater ex-


  1. Erich Gunther, Handbuch von Mexico, Leipzig, 1912.
  2. See Karl Sapper, Wirtschaftsgeographie von Mexico, 1908, for a discussion of German interests in Mexico.