I have spoken of the peons as Indians, and so they are for the most part in the districts we visited; but travellers who have been in Chihuahua and other northern states tell stories of creditors travelling through the country to collect their debts, and, where money was not forthcoming, collecting their debtors instead,—not merely brown Indians, but also nearly white mestizos.
Mexico is one of the countries in which the contrast between great riches and great poverty is most striking. No traveller ever enters the country without making this remark. The mass of the people are hardly even with the world; and there are some few capitalists whose incomes can scarcely be matched in England or Russia. Yet this state of things has not produced a permanent aristocracy.
The general history of great fortunes repeats itself with monotonous regularity. Fortunate miners or clever speculators, who have happened to possess the gift of accumulating in addition to that of getting, often make colossal fortunes. Miners have made the greatest sums, and made them most rapidly. Fortunes of two or three millions sterling are not uncommon now, and we often meet with them in the history of the last century. They never seem to have lasted many years. Before the Independence, the capitalist used to buy a patent of nobility, and leave great sums to his children to maintain the new dignity; but they hardly ever seem to have done anything but squander away their inheritance, and we find the family returning to its original poverty by the third or fourth generation.