MEXICO’S LOWEST CLASS.
A, (a). Unfortunate men and women who have no normal or certain means of subsistence; they live in the streets and sleep in public sleeping-places, crouched in the portales, in the shelters of doorways, amid the rubbish of buildings in construction, in some meson if they can pay for the space three or four centavos a night, or stowed away in the house of some compadre or friend. They are beggars, gutter-snipes, paper-sellers, grease-buyers, rag-pickers, scrub-women, etc. With difficulty they earned twenty or thirty centavos daily; now they may receive more, but the general rise in prices leaves them in the same condition of misery. They are covered with rags, they scratch themselves constantly, in their tangled hair they carry the dust and mud of every quarter of the city. They never bathe themselves save when the rain drenches them, and their bare feet are cracked and calloused, and assume the color of the ground. In general, they do not attain to an old age, but to a precocious decrepitude, worn out by syphilis, misery, and drink.
The men and women of this class have completely lost modesty; their language is that of the drinking-house; they live in sexual promiscuity, get drunk daily, frequent the lowest pulquerias of the meanest quarters; they quarrel