Page:A Study of Mexico.djvu/247

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
MEXICAN BUSINESS HONESTY.
237

tion 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.

Consul-General Sutton, of Matamoros, 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