Litchfield enquirer., 1880-05-20
General Grant on Business Chances in
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 "rhe resources of Mexico are almost un. limited The latter, together with the altitude from tide water up to the limit of vegetation, makes it possible within very short distance to have every product under the sun. You can find places where you can go in an hours ride on horse from an extreme tropical cli- mate up to where you can gather ice any day of the year in the ravines."
 ''What do they call the coffee which they false there, General P
 ''No particular name: nothing but Mexi- can coffee. There in not much of it that comes here. They have no incentive to cul- tivate coffee, for tie reason they have no means of transporting it: They could not get it out of the country. When you have to take everything on the backs of mules and ride for hundreds of miles, trade must be exclusively domestic, and very small at that. ~. '-
 Tere are these 1000, 900 of people, willing to go to work any minute, and glad to: They would go to work fer % cents day at first, but when you create market for these things there will be demand and there will be 8 competition for their labor, and the more they begin to get the more they will spend, and what they spend they will get back in wages. The sale of cheap jewelry-tbat will become a. great traffic. And watches; take these cheap
 
 and iron in all its shapes-railroad iron loco- motives, cars, and engines, agricultural imple- ments-that will be one of the first things. Now they just have a little cross stick that they dig~up the ground with. There is no market for products,- except just enough to; feed the people, and that is very little, but tine minute you create g market they would all want improved agricultural machinery. Now, it takes no more than $250 year to dress these raDchmen, but instead of that, they would spend twice the amount for shoes alone, to say nothing about the increased amount for their clothes, and the poor people would all wear cotton goods"
 "What do the women wear now"
 "They get some calico and they pay for it out of this cheap labor. They have to pay 200 per cent more than they do here, at least that much more for calico. s But that calico dress will last one of those poor women five years, just as the silk dress used to last our mothers when we were boys. A great many ladies then had one silk dress and that was only one they had during their lives. And go it is with these women One calico dress is all they may ever get." /
 "Well, aow, General suppose some of our people should go m there, as they do in the South, and start coffee plantations, would they be well receiyed?" "s--a @aA kyg- ,.,--> -sg. .-.
 sOh, yes; and some of them should raise sugar and cotton. Any young man can go there now and do well, if he will. I should say let him go to Oajaca, and he will make fortune if he will just be little patient and steady. In the first place, .you can buy a. piece of land about six sections, two miles and six-tenths square, of the best sugar and coffee land in the world for $500, and can hire labor CTS for % cents day. A man with $1 1000 or $2. 900 could buy one of these big tracts of land and hire men to commence putting in. In doing the planting he ought to generally commence planting coffee and sugar, aud, when he has done that, watch the market and keep little store where he can buy sugar for @ cent pound there-buy all the sugar and all the coffee that comes in, and pay the money for it they will take the money for what they bring in, first, but the poor people would not carry @ cent away and he could build up a big trade in his store. speak of Oajaca, as that is only about twenty y-fve miles from the Pacific Coast, where there is harbor, and where steamers already stop once a month. He could thus ship direct to San Francisco, or he could ship by Panama for the eastern mar ket that way"
 ''Is this coffee hard to cultivate?"
 No; no more trouble in raising coffee : than in raising peaches in our own country"
 "There seems to be big opening for these young men?"
 ''There is big opening both for individuals and for the country. It is thing we've got to look to, as we are importing an enormous amount of the arncles which Mexico could furnish us, and which we could get by an ex- change of commodities. Ev n Havana, right on our coast, doesn't buy anything from us j; if we want to sell her flour, she has to send to Spain to get our four" fE &Sf