Page:The Mexican Problem (1917).djvu/29

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PREFACE
xxi

potters and patterns were being ruined by German crockery.

Latin America has faced the same drastic pressure. A century ago all the world, when Canning called a new world into being to redress the balance of the old, looked to see the economic development of the revolted colonies of Spain and Portugal. Bad as Spanish administration was and relentless as was the censorship of the Inquisition, the printing-presses of Mexico turned out, relative to the mechanic art of the day, better work two hundred years ago than to-day. It is the older pottery of Mexico to which one turns for the far-flung influence of the faïence of Spain fashioned out of the light volcanic clays of Mexico. It is not the recent edifices of Mexico our architects study to give us what we call "Mission" architecture. Let Courts be absent and justice dubious, and the sure end of the investment of $1,000,000,000 which Mr. Barron sketches was predetermined. When "Boston people had great hopes of traffic in the Mexican Central line they built from El Paso to connect with the City of Mexico," they were themselves so familiar with the courts of Massachusetts that they looked on the justice men trust as a normal natural product of so-