BoletiÌn mercantil de Puerto Rico. (San Juan, P.R.) 18??-1918, 1902-04-03

How long since Mexico began 10
awaken her sleeping riches one may
only guess and guess wrongly should
say it was a year since the centuries of
sloth were shaken off and the new in
dustria1 era began. That would be the
Judgment of a stranger formed on
the spot. This Judgment would not be
correct, for those who have been here
say that the beginning goes back twerl-
ty years, and that the era of the new
Mexico itself opened ten years ago.
This probably, is true, but it is not
formed on first impression, because the
activity is so great that the visitor gets
the notion that all these enterprises
could only have developed suddenly.
Yet none of them has come up over
night. They are the outcome of ttiliz-
ing crude material which has laid un-
touched for generations.
The activity is not feverish. Even
the promoter, who is everywhere, is a
fairly conservative indiv dual. He is
not gaining fortune in . day. He is
making money by directing capital to
fields where fortunes ere being made
gradually and sensibly. American cap
ital now is the chief factor in the devel-
opment of Mexico, and there are
widening channels for its outflow in
this direction. Trade is growing closer
and closer between the two countries,
and the United States is furnishing
the bulk of the articles consumed in
Mexico.
Iron and steel manufactures and
machinery are first, but there is also a
steady increase in carriages and wagons,
in hardware and in similar articles.
Not all of this increased commerce is
due to the closer union through railway
lines, because the statistics show that
the commerce of the gulf ports also
has increased very largely.
An American railway president told
me that Mexico was still just twenty
years behind the United States in its
railway system. He meant by this
that the country was slow rather in its
traffic management and operating dep
artnent than in the building OF new
lines of communication. He thought
that there should be more consultations
and more centralization. That is what
the railway president always thinks
when he is taking in somebody else's
line instead of having his own swallow
ed up.
A fact which has most impressed me
regarding the railways is the number
of routes by which Mexico is seeking
to open up pathways from the Gulf OF
Mexico across to the Pacific Ocean.
She is planning for tranScontinental
trade, regardless of the prospective
isthmian canal. Both the national gov
ernment and the various state govern
ments have been very liberal IN their
Subsidies and other forms of aiding
railway enterprise, but now they are
becoming more conservative. The
Mexican government itself has spent
great sums on the railroad across the
ITehuantepec isthmus, where it was
once the dream of James B. Eads to
have ship railway. The difficulties
of construction there in the swampy
lands have been almost fatal to the
enterprise, but after the expenditure of
vast sums it is asserted that substan-
tia1 and enduring Tehuantepec railway
is nearing completion.
After making various concessions to
enterprising parties to build south from
the Tehdantepec to the Guatemala line
the government is now hopeful that the
project will be carried out successfully
and that at the border it will meet the
extension which Guatemala promises
and which will form one Central Amer
lean link in ex-senator Henry G. Davis's
project of the Pan-American Railway.
Whether this is done or not, within two
or three years the network of Mexican
railway systems will be complete from