it will require a long time for the enlightened requirements of extended commerce to displace it. The fidelity of this class has been already, elsewhere, alluded to; and whilst it is personally reliable and responsible, its members are scarcely ever attacked by the bands of robbers infesting the recesses of the mountains, and laying in wait for less numerous, resolute or organized way-farers. Millions were, and still are, often entrusted to them with perfect confidence by the government and the people.
Nevertheless, within the last fifteen years the growing manufactures of Mexico required a stouter means of transportation of heavy machinery than the limbs of a mule, and the consequence was that intelligent foreigners availing themselves of this want in the first instance, gradually introduced heavy wagons like those of the European roulage system, into which, by degrees, they forced a large portion of the bulky commercial freight which was to be borne from the coast into the interior. Simultaneously with this encroachment on the mule, the arriero, and the litera, appeared the American stage coach, built in New York; and together with the coach and its spirited horses, came the "Yankee driver," whose accommodating and daring character soon made him a favorite with those whose trade he in some measure injured, though it did not serve to protect him or his passengers from the attacks of robbers. The line of diligences or coaches established from Vera Cruz to the capital, passing through Jalapa, Peroté and Puebla, was gradually extended northwards from the capital through the principal mining and commercial cities of the north, and thus the means of swift and comfortable travel was at length, though only recently, supplied to a small part of Mexico.
The danger of robbers, the wretchedness of the roads, the discomfort of inns and the old fashioned Mexican habit of staying at home, have, therefore, hitherto prevented the masses of the people from going abroad. A journey of two or three hundred miles, for any purpose but