CHAPTER XV
MEXICO OF TO-MORROW
It is fashionable in some quarters, when the subject of the future of Latin-America is discussed, to adopt an air of profound pessimism. It is surprising to encounter men of experience, who, in dealing with such questions, adopt the attitude that progress among certain races is impossible, and that to expect advance—social, political, or commercial—in regard to them is to expect the incredible. Yet the lessons of race-history do not teach us such counsels of despair. Many great nations have lapsed into barbarism or else been totally forgotten, whilst others have risen from the most negligible beginnings to a place in the forefront of the world's activities. There is nothing in the geographical position or natural resources of Mexico which would lead us to the conclusion that one day, when her national evolution is complete, that she will not be able to take her place side by side with the most favoured countries. Nor is there anything in the type or constitution of the race which inhabits her soil which unfits them for a great destiny. Those who criticise the peoples of Latin-America are usually those who understand them least. At present, taking them all in all, they are in some respects an adolescent people. Moreover, they are a highly composite people; and what race, it may be asked, has been enabled to justify itself before it had reached that stage in its evolution when the various stocks of which it was composed had been welded into ethnic unity? Certainly not the Anglo-Saxon race, which does not appear as a European power of any magnitude until the beginning of the sixteenth century—precisely the epoch at which Mexico was discovered.
It cannot be too strongly insisted upon that the two races
