States.[1] They are slow, but pay their bills, make few business compromises, and still fewer failures. From actual inspection of books of large houses in Mexico, exhibiting accounts of a series of years, I found that eighty-five to ninety per cent of long credit sales were paid in* full. Not one American business man in five hundred will succeed in Mexico, for the sole reason that he attempts to force his own ways and methods upon a people whose habits and ways are the antipodes of his own. Our manners are not in accord with the extreme politeness and consideration to be found in Mexico. Business is largely done on the basis of feeling and sentiment, and established acquaintance. Neither has time nor money the transcendent value that it has with us." It is also interesting to note here, that for these, or some other reasons, there are comparatively few Jews in Mexico, and that as a race they do not seem to fancy the country, either as a place of residence or for the transaction of business.
But, notwithstanding all these obstacles to the extension of trade, the advantages from commercial intercourse with Mexico are all on the side of the United States. Commerce, in establishing a course between any two points, always follows the lines of least resistance. And today, through the establishment of railway lines, which furnish ample, rapid, and comparatively cheap facilities for transportation between the interior of Mexico and such great commercial and manufacturing centers as Chicago, Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Kansas City, the easiest movement for the commerce of Mexico is by and through the United States. One demonstration of this is to be found in the fact that the Mexican Central Railroad now carries considerable freight that comes to New York by European steamers, and is thence transported, in bond, by rail directly through to Mexico; to which it may be added that some $300,000 of this freight, during the past year, is understood to have been English agricultural machinery, which has been bought in preference to the world-wide famous American farm machinery and implements, and carried past, as it were, the very doors cf the American competing factories! For such a singular result there are two explanations. One is, that not only in Mexico, but in all the Central and
- ↑ Consul-General Sutton, of Matamoras, tells the following story illustrative of the good faith in a mercantile transaction of the rancheros of Northern Mexico, the particulars of which were detailed to him by the parties concerned: "A German house in interior Mexico contracted for the purchase of two hundred mule-colts, to be delivered a year following; and payment, at the rate of twenty dollars a pair, was made in advance. A year elapsed, and the mules were not delivered. The head of the house would not, however, allow any message of inquiry or reminder to be sent, but remained quiet. A year after the stipulated time, the rancheros came in with the mules. There had been a disease and a drought, which had killed the colts the first year, and this was the reason assigned for not coming according to agreement. They sent no word, because it was so far, and they did not remember the name." When the firm counted the mules, they found that three had been brought for each pair stipulated and paid for; which was the way the rancheros quietly settled for their unavoidable breach of contract.
