on the assignment of some specific income, such as the revenue from a stamp tax or a percentage of the customs dues at a certain port. Such arrangements make the creditor's claim one still more intimately connected with both foreign relations and domestic politics.
Mexico's financial history—both that of her foreign and of her internal financial operations—is a tangle that cannot be reviewed here except in the most general outline.[1] From the beginning to the end of the Diaz régime there was a fairly steady improvement in the international standing of the republic. Defaulting, which was formerly a steady habit, disappeared after order was established, and bonds could be sold with interest and rate of issue which did not make them usurious. This had by no means been true in early Mexican history.
In 1824, for example, when obligations of a face value equivalent to $16,000,000 were issued for Mexico by the British house B. A. Goldsmidt & Co., the five per cent bonds had to be floated at 58.[2] A six per cent loan the following year brought 89¾ per cent. After 1827 the interest went unpaid for a time and later was paid only irregularly.
Between 1837 and 1839 the debt and unpaid interest were refunded. The total of the obligations recognized
- ↑ A more detailed review of the foreign debt is found in the Forty-fifth Annual Report of the Council of the Corporation of Foreign Bondholders. . . for the year 1918, London, 1919, from which the figures in the following paragraphs are largely taken. See also a careful analysis by W. F. McCaleb, The Public Finances of Mexico, New York, 1921, passim.
- ↑ The figures in this chapter are in Mexican gold except where otherwise stated.
