Page:About Mexico - Past and Present.djvu/334

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ABOUT MEXICO.

other charities which are supported by private individuals. With all these opportunities, however, it is still true that six-sevenths of the people of Mexico can neither read nor write. The business enterprise of the country is in the hands of a very few, and those mostly foreigners. The higher classes are not inferior in intelligence and culture to cultivated people in the most favored lands. The Mexican is fluent in conversation and urbane in manner, but the wide gap between the

A MEXICAN SENORA.

aristocracy and the lower orders reveals Mexico's great need of a middle class prepared by education for those blessings of constitutional liberty which the masses are yet trampling under their feet for very ignorance.

Most of the two hundred and thirty thousand residents of the capital are Indians. The kneeling crowd in the churches on some saint's day is largely aboriginal in its make-up, and as democratic as in ancient days.