oldness and their newness-the Spanish of them and their modern-Mexicanism. No other nation has founded so extensively such beneficences in its colonies, and few colonies have built so well upon their inheritance. It is a useful Delsartean attitude for the mind to try to "fahney" England peppering New England with schools, hospitals, asylums, and churches for Indians. But that is what infamous Spain did, three hundred years ago, up and down a space which measures something over one hundred and three New Englands. We may pick flaws in

these institutions as administered while we were hanging witches, but the institutions were there-and are there yet.

The Royal Hospital of Mexico (for Indians) was founded in 1553. It covered three and a half acres-good elbow-room for its normal two hundred and twenty patients. In the great epidemic of 1762, by crowding, it cared for eight thousand three hundred and sixty-one, and it is still operative. This is but a beginning in the list. The Beneficéncia Pública alone has charge of ten institutions in the city, on which it expends $25,000 a month-like the Industrial School, the School of Correction (also industrial), the Asylum of the Poor (whose plain exterior hides a truly beautiful home for the nine hundred inmates, mostly children, who are educated and given useful trades in an atmosphere of flowers and music); a hospital for the wounded; a maternity hospital; a school for the blind; an insane asylum for men, another for womenand so on. It feeds three thousand four hundred people, and supervises the public sale of drink and food. When the great new hospital-on the French detached plan, with thirty-five buildings fifty feet apart, at a cost of $800,000-is completed, the present hospitals, all of which are very valuable properties, will be sold.

And here a word may be spoken in season of the beggars who so dent the sensibilities of the average tourist. One reason why mosquitoes seem so numerous is that we cannot get away from them. So with the Mexican beggar. Wherever you go. you see all there is of

him; and meeting ten people, of whom two are beggars, you naturally conclude that the same proportion holds good throughout the whole population. But this is a generic blunder. As a matter of fact, long field study in both lines leads to a conviction that there are probably not so many professional beggars per cent. in Mexico as tramps in the United States. But the tramp is never concentric, and only the curious student, the railroad man on a transcontinental line, and the police authority dream how enormous is our

army of mendicants. The Mexican pordiosero,* too, has a different stock in trade. His capital is to look as poor, diseased, and repulsive as he possibly can

maybe with a vague intuition that the pneumogastric nerve has a large voice in the congress of the emotions. He has not learned the broader platform of insolence, bulldozing, and alternative crime. He clings to the traditions of his craftfor it is a profession, and inclined to be a gentle one. He whines, it is true-be"For-God's-sake-er," literally.

cause he is of a people to whom a whine sounds pitiful, and not contemptible-but his appeal is as perfect in its fine rhetoric as in its humility. And when you have bestowed the copper tlaco, which is all that he expects, he says (sincerely and without a dream of irony), "God give more to you!" Mexico has as many poor as any other city of 350.000, I know-and more than any in the United States-but it must be borne in mind that the vast majority of them are laborers, and only the petty minority beggars. As for actual suffering, there is far less than in any of our large urban populations. Even the beggar's coppers are plenty to provide him with the indispensables of life in a motherly climate.

From beggars to churches is but a step-at least in physics, since the church door is a favorite stalking-ground for these shrewd reckoners of the emotions. The temples of the capital are by class the most inevitable buildings in it-not only for the old heroism they represent, nor solely for their architectural beauty, great as it is. The Samson of a cathedral is shorn of its locks. The third course of its towers (two hundred and eight feet high, as it is) was forbidden by royal edict to be erected, for fear of the effect of so vast a weight upon the treacherous soil of the ex-swamp. It is a pity, for this is the only outer fault of a magnificent pile; and since it stands on the rock islet of the

teocalli, the due proportions of the towers might have been carried out without probable danger of the sinking which has so tilted the beautiful Profesa, Tolsa's classic Loreto, and many of the older other buildings.

The Jesuit, Dominican, and Franciscan schools of church architecture have here their most perfect convention (though not in every case the greatest known delegate); and there is, besides, the striking type peculiar to this city, the style Churrigueresque, named for a native architect of the seventeenth century, whose finest monuments are the Sagrario (elbowing the cathedral) and La Santisima. Their fachadas, and the patio of the ex-convent of San Agustin (now the post-office of Querétaro), present the most remarkable stone-carving in North American ar chitecture. That is no small thing to say. when one remembers the thousands of churches in Mexico, of which hardly one lacks some noble characteristic. Content is a happy trait, but I doubt if such content is happy that is past being startled by the comparison of our religious edifices with those of a disprized land and faith.

It is curious to speculate whence came the pentecost of skill and daring which not only made every church a monument, but in so many seems to have delighted in braving the constructional traditions. The flat arches, the flying arches. the arches with space instead of masonry

to receive their "lateral thrust," the pendent staircases, the omitted pillars, the keyless domes-there are a thousand venturesomenesses, yet not one lapse from security. And to these days some architects in Mexico pluck gravitation by the beard in a fashion that is not familiar to me outside of Latin America.

The caracoles or snail-shell stone staircases are always fascinating; and they are in nearly every tower. That in the prison of Hidalgo (in Chihuahua) is the common type; but the cathedral of Mexico has a wonderful caracol without a The ninety-two chiluca steps, instead of concentring to form a pillar, form a central hole, and down that superb spiral one can peer from top to bottom.

core.

But, as I was to say, religion nor architecture nor historic association is the only attraction to these venerable piles. To do much of anything of importance in the modern city one must go to church. The Reforma was a movement in whose swift thoroughness public necessity took no heavier hand than private greed. Diverted from the church, the edifices were looted of their plate, their silver altarrails, and their Murillos-one gentleman, since happily dead, got $60,000 at a pawnshop for the paintings he had collected by this simple process. The buildings themselves were promptly "denounced," and sold for beggarly sums-many of them for beggarly ends. You cannot sample far among the hotels without lodging in an ex-convent. You may have your livery turnout from another. If you visit school or barracks or hospital, it will generally be in another. And if you chance to go to prison, you would, at this writing, be locked inside of church walls. Of course it all results in far more costly and artistic schoolhouses, hospitals, and prisons than

are fashionable in lands which have not had the lucky opportunity to get ahead of their Maker.

But her attitude in poenology to-day is very significant of modern Mexico. Mexican prisons, in my observation, have as a rule richly deserved all their inmates, whether native or imported; and also some of their ill repute as a mode of luxury. Until people can build prisons for prisons, they must use what makeshifts they may; and superb architecture does not reconcile the prisoner to the natural shortcomings of a jail which was built for a church. Belem, the great general lockup, is the old convent of that name, and is not at all adequate for its more than three thousand inmates-though I have seen worse arrangements in some American cities. Santiago de Tlaltelolco, the military prison, is as superannuated. It is one of the oldest churches in Mexico, having been founded by the first viceroy: and its convent was one of the first schools-in which the historian Sahagun was a professor. It was a school for the sons of Indian caciques.

But the day of the makeshift is passing. Just before I left the capital the retiring governor of the federal district turned over to the federal government the new penitentiary, a model modern institution, * An honorable type of the administrators of modern Mexico, Don Pedro Rincon Gallardo.

Looking down from top.

on the Croffton plan, which, I believe, has not yet its equal anywhere among us. It cost over two millions, covers eighteen acres, and is perfect in every detail of sanitation, security, and comfort. Before these lines are published it will be occupied, and the days of Tlaltelolco and Belem will be done. There is similar activity all over the republic in replacing the old ad interim convent-jails with institutions up to date. The state penitentiary at Puebla, for instance, is a type of what is being done by cities we would account small, and states that seem to us

THE BARRACKS OF LA MERCED.

but sparsely settled. There is no hanging in Mexico, and (outside what concerns the army and the brigands) no capital punishment. Nor are irons allowed under the new dispensation. I have known the holy horror of officers of ours at not being allowed to manacle prisoners they were extraditing. The modern Mexican theory is that irons are an ignominy, and that it is the officer's business to keep his man. It may surprise the average reader to learn that the object of prisons in Mexico is not so much punishment as reform by education. To

such, the modern laws of Diaz regulating penitentiaries should be instructive reading. In these laws, of course, the credit system for good behavior cuts as certain a figure as the compulsory education. and the learning of trades in the finely appointed shops.

Except the artillery and the engineers, whatever regiment you visit is quartered in an old convent. Of these barracks the most interesting is the Merced, founded in 1601, with a patio which is one of the finest in the city. Many schools are similar debtors to the unthanked past; and in their case, at least, one may be most willing to pardon the usurpation. The capital has, by-the-way, fifty public schools for boys, forty-nine for girls, six mixed, and nine night schools. There is also a large number of private institutions, from the kindergarten up, and of special schools, training-schools, and the like. It is also to be noted, amid the educational progress, that on the 16th of September the metric system became compulsory throughout the republic, and that