which they affect more because of its universal popularity and "smartness" than because they care for the principal item in its restricted menu. In Mexico, the afternoon cup of tea is nearly always accompanied by wine, even champagne being partaken of along with the tea, for the purpose (one may be pardoned for suggesting) of drowning the taste of the infusion, which is nauseous to most Mexicans.
Among the upper classes the standard of personal integrity is high. The average Mexican gentleman is proud of his honour and punctilious in his care that it shall not in any way become smirched. Public integrity, too, as instanced in the Press, is idealistic; but there is no law which can suppress comment upon a case while it is sub judice, and, in consequence, justice occasionally suffers. In certain contingencies, the law is none too scrupulously adhered to in a country where lawyers abound—the sceptic might be inclined to say for that precise reason; for just as in highly civilised Scotland, where the percentage of lawyers is very large, private legal abuses are frequent and notorious through the laxity of the great legal corporations, in Mexico the lawyer is seldom answerable for his misdeeds to any higher authority; and as he composes the class that makes the laws and administers them, abuses are likely to flourish and continue so long as such conditions prevail.
The integrity of the Mexican shopkeeping class is less punctilious than that of its betters. Most Mexican shop-keepers have a different price for their fellow-countrymen and for the unfortunate estrangeiro; and as imported goods are already sufficiently highly ticketed, by the time the Mexican merchant has appraised them to the visitor they have mounted to an extortionate figure. Firmness is essential in dealing with traders in the better shops of the capital, unless the purchaser be one of those happily-circumstanced folk who can afford to disburse a profit of 150 per cent., and who prefers to do so rather than submit to an encounter in the unpleasant art of haggling.
