Julio Guerrero was born on April 18, 1862, a day notable in Mexican history, in the City of Mexico. His parents were JosÉ MarÍa Guerrero and Luisa Groso, both natives of Durango. His father, a lawyer of eminence, was for fifteen years a Judge of the Supreme Court; a pronounced Liberal in politics, he was a friend and trusted adviser of Benito Juarez. The young Julio was sent to Rhodes’s English Boarding School, then to the Escuela Preparatoria (National Preparatory School). He, later, studied in the Escuela de Jurisprudencia, receiving his title of Licenciado by acclamation, on October 4, 1889. In that same year, he was one of the founders of the Revista de Jurisprudencia y Legislacion (Review of Jurisprudence and Legislation), upon which he is still a collaborator and to which he has contributed many articles. His most important literary work is El Genesis del Crimen en Mexico (The Genesis of crime in Mexico). The title of the book scarcely accords with its content. It is really an analysis of the Mexican society and character. Rarely does any student see, so clearly as does Guerrero, the actual condition of his own society; still more rarely does one so clearly state it. In some of his conclusions and views Guerrero differs profoundly from us, but we are forced to admire his sincerity and earnestness. His book met a notable reception. Under the presidency of Porfirio Parra, a group of the leading members of the scientific societies of Mexico, devoted ten consecutive meetings to its consideration and discussion, the author himself being present. During the recent political agitation by the partisans of Limantour and Reyes, Guerrero established and edited a monthly journal, La Republica. It was ardently liberal and democratic in spirit and dealt vigorously with live questions. It was suppressed by the government, after fourteen issues. Guerrero has not abandoned his propaganda and will shortly establish another journal for the propagation of his ideas. He has much matter ready for printing. Of this, undoubtedly the most important is his Reformas projectadas (Proposed reforms), in which the question of the Presidential succession is discussed. Guerrero is a good thinker, intense in his convictions, vigorous in their expression. Our selections are from the Genesis del crimen. Guerrero’s style is not always beyond reproach and his punctuation is absolutely his own. In translation, we have followed both with care.

THE MEXICAN ATMOSPHERE.

As a psychical phenomenon, natural to so pure an atmosphere, there have developed in Mexico those faculties, which require perfect eyesight. Mexican photographs have attracted notice in New York, and Mora conducts, in competition with the best photographers of that metropolis, a profitable business, being quite in vogue with the American aristocracy. The photographic views of the central plateau are distinguished by the sharpness of their outlines, shadows and details and are exported to Europe and the United States, constituting, in those regions, of less clear vision, an irrefutable proof of the perfection of our landscapes transferred to their canvases by Velasco and other painters of scenery; when he desired to exhibit his paintings of the Valley, in the exposition of 1889, he found opposition on the part of Meissonier, who believed it impossible that there should be such sharp and vivid detail and coloring in a real landscape. Proofs of a different order, and entirely practical, of the sharpness of outline, are given by our professional hunters, who with a miserable musket, sally from their pueblos in the morning in search of game and invariably return with two animals. In the battalions, good shots form seventy-five per cent of the troop, with certainty of aim at five hundred to a thousand metres distance. The wild Indians of Coahuila, Chihuahua, and Nuevo Leon, shoot their arrows at a five-cent piece thrown into the air; and boys on the streets and in the villages strike the bulls-eye with their sling-stones at a distance only limited by their strength. In billiards and bowling, in the suburbs, with badly rounded balls and illy-leveled tables, they make shots as brilliant as if both balls and tables were all they should be.

The arts of drawing have developed as rapidly as the political and economical conditions permitted; and in all America, Mexico has been the only country which has produced a school, so numerous, distinguished, and original have been her painters. Their works have almost been exhausted, by exportation to Europe as paintings of Spanish artists of the great Seventeenth Century, but students still come, from the republics to the south, sent to here study the masterpieces which we still retain, since the number of the national painters, of whom some work of merit remains, rises to one hundred and sixty-one. The art they practised was catholic and aristocratic, religious subjects and portraits; consequently it decayed with the colonial regime and fell with the decline of power of the clergy; but, in the lack of demand for such art, the national Æsthetic spirit took refuge in popular modeling in clay, rags, or wax, and produced in the figurines of Guadalajara and Puebla an artistic school, only inferior in product and spontaneity to that of Tanagra in ancient Greece.

In the feather-mosaics of Michoacan, in its lacquer rivaling those of China; in the carving on the walking-sticks of Apizaco, atavic manifestation of the ancient Mexican wood-carving which found beautiful expression in the choir-stalls and benches of the churches; in the floral decorations of the Indians of Mixcoac and Coyoacan; in the sculptures of the faÇades of houses—which are at times caryatids worked, without a single false blow from the chisel, after the blocks have been set in the wall; in the gold and silver filagree, and even in the mural paintings of the pulquerias or in the realistic illustrations of the newspapers, there is revealed the artistic talent, though frequently without technique, of a nation, living in a medium propitious to vision; and in which the line, the shadow, and the tints, are seen without blur or dimmed by haze, since there are, on the average, one hundred and five absolutely clear days in the year and among clouded days, those with mists are rare; and when these do occur they last but an hour or two in wintry mornings.

GOVERNMENTAL DIFFICULTIES.

This social phenomenon was aggravated by the distribution of villas within the territory of each of the provinces, later converted into states; since in many cases it happened that the villas were so much the nearer to their respective capitals, as these were nearer to the capital of the republic; and vice-versa, the villas were distant from their capitals in proportion as these were distant from the national centre; both consequences of the political division established by Galvez; since, as he based it upon the unequal distribution of population, the more remote provinces must have a more extended territory and more widely separated settlements; thus, the density of population decreased, from the centre outward, in every direction. And as the social development in a province, converted later into an autonomous state, depended on the frequency and importance of the relations between the capitals and their respective districts; it resulted that the culture influence of the capital, weakened by its remoteness from a state, was still further weakened in the villas, by the great distances which separated them from their governmental centres. And this phenomenon was repeated in a third degree, in the interior of each political subdivision, in the operation of social and political influence of any villa upon the lesser settlements subordinated to it.

Ah well, as all the cities of the independent colony were at different distances from the capital, they were at different stages of national development; consequently all had different and often conflicting interests, necessities and aspirations. The political program, philosophical ideas, literature, ideals and models of art, social usages, moral principles, interpretations of law, cut of dress, and even the vocabulary and phrases of polite society, which—as useless, ugly, harmful, absurd, or disagreeable—had been banished from the capital were found in the provincial cities; and those, which were there proscribed, had taken refuge in the villas and secondary towns. In matter of government the same thing was repeated and those acts by which it displays itself—military equipment, judicial decision, tax levying, seizure of contraband, pursuit of bandits and savages, organization of authority, conspiracies, masonry, political intrigues,—in fact, every political phenomenon which, depended upon or originated in the capital, was repeated in the states, with an imperfectness, so much the greater as the distance separating them from it was greater; and, as the conduct of government depended upon this phenomenon, it at last resulted that the co-ordination and harmony between the states and the centre depended on the time necessary for the communication of official orders. Accord between those who constituted the governing classes of all the cities, villas, and subordinate populations, was, consequently, not only difficult, but was often impossible, and, sometimes, useless. Thus, the country was geographically constructed and populated for an inevitable anarchy; an area within which every union of states, provinces, cities, religions, races, or political parties, had to be theoretical and unstable.

The most important corroboration of this law was the separation of Texas, political phenomenon, which, thanks to it, has an explanation actually mathematical. In fact, the settlers, who recognized San Antonio as their centre, did not amount to forty thousand inhabitants scattered over an area larger than that of the French Republic, and depended politically upon the State of Coahuila, of which the capital is Saltillo. The distance which separated, by the cart-roads of that time, these two points, was eight hundred and sixty-eight kilometres, which they traversed in sixteen days in the dry season and in thirty-two days in the period of rains, and the distance from Mexico to Saltillo was nine hundred and forty-seven kilometres—or say, twenty days in the dry and forty days in the wet season. If instead of considering the local capitals, we consider the frontiers of the provinces, distances double and difficulties increase.

ATAVISMS.

This phenomenon, moreover, is but the anthropological expression of a more general biological law, in virtue of which human races, in order to adapt themselves to the medium in which they are developed, assume a uniform physical type and character, which persists, or repeats itself anatomically and psychically through the ages, in spite of the external forms of their civilization; in the same way as do other animals, and plants. Thus, for example, since the days of Trajan the bullocks of the Danube have had enormous and diverging horns; in China the cattle are hump-backed, despite cross-breeding with other strains; and, although the first offspring from crossing may be like the foreign parent, in the fifth or sixth generation there appears in the creole calf the hump of the original and native form. Among the ancient castas of the vice-reinal society the negro was seen to reappear in families of white, or even of red parentage, provided there had been blacks in the ancestry. In the waters of the Nile, the lotus yet floats its blue corolla, which the architects of Memphis copied in the capitals of their temples; and the Fellah of Pharaonic days reappears in families crossed with the Macedonians of the Ptolemies; and, in the first centuries of the Arab domination, in spite of the torrents of foreign blood introduced by polygamy. Even today the type reasserts itself in the native regiments of the English army at Cairo—bronzed, titanic, full-chested, a living model, which is copied in the colossi of Isamboul and which is the ethnic brother type of the Rameses and Amenhotep.

In the central tableland of Mexico, arid, hot, and luminous, where the atmosphere keeps the nerves at high tension; where thoughts are clouded by the abuse of tobacco, of alcohol and of coffee; by the irritation of an eternal and fruitless battle for life; and, until lately, by the frightful impossibility, almost age-long, of forming a plexus of social solidarity; character, in the greater part of society has degenerated and the ferocious tendencies of the Aztecs have reappeared. After ten generations, there has returned, to beat within the breasts of some of our compatriots, the barbaric soul of the worshipers of Huitzilopochtl, of those of the sacred springtimes who went, to the lugubrious sounds of the teponastl to make razzias of prisoners in Tlaxcala and Huejotzinco, to open their breasts with obsidian knives, to tear out the heart and eat it in the holocaust of their gods. Three centuries of masses and of barracks have been too little for the complete evolution of character among the people; and if, on the Silesian plain, the Sarmatian of Attila yet appears, so too in our political struggle there has re-appeared, with the indomitable warrior of Ahuitzotl, the sanguinary priest of Huitzilopochtl.

There is, in fact, nothing in our independent history, more lugubrious; even the most illustrious leaders have stained their glory by the shedding, needlessly, of blood. The burning of villages and executions en masse present themselves at the turning of every page like the funeral refrain of an infernal poem; and, if it be true, that there are not lacking some superior souls—as Don NicolÁs Bravo, who set at liberty three hundred Spanish prisoners, although he knew the Spanish leader had just shot his father—many other leaders, of that and later epochs, systematically executed all who fell into their hands. The system was converted into a custom and gave such an impress of barbarity to our political struggles as is not to be found even in negro Africa; since there war prisoners are held as captives, whose ransom is the motive of war; slavery redeems them from death.

In Mexico, on the contrary, frequently no account is made of prisoners but only of the killed and wounded; and the latter were shot or knifed in spite of the severity of their wounds. Hidalgo himself not only ordered that those taken in battle should be killed without fail; but in Guadalajara and Valladolid commanded the seizure of suspects and caused them to be stabbed at night, in remote places, that they might not, by their cries, cause a disturbance. In this way six hundred innocent persons perished; and he advised the leader, Hermosillo, to do the same in El Rosario and CosalÁ. Morelos, after the battles of Chilapa, Izucar, Oaxaca, etc., shot all his prisoners without mercy; and Osorio did the same in the valley of Mexico, GarcÍa in Bajio, and all the other insurgent leaders, though usually in the way of reprisal.

In the first insurrection, military ferocity developed to a degree only seen in Asiatic and African wars, without the least regard for humanity and with systematic neglect of the rights of nations. The prisoners surrendered with Sarda in Soto la Marina, for example, were taken to San Juan de UlÚa, on foot, in pairs, shackled together, and in the fortress, were entombed in humid, dark, pestilential, dungeons, hot from the tropical sun of the coast lands. This constant corporal subjection, led to mutual hatreds among the unhappy beings, since the natural necessities of the two members of a couple were rarely simultaneous; and in order to satisfy thirst or any other need it was necessary to beg permission of one’s companion; which led to constant bickerings between them and occasioned sport for the jailors. Orrantia personally struck General Mina, when he was taken prisoner, with the flat of his sword. To hasten the surrender of the Fort of Sombrero, the same leader left one hundred corpses, of those who had fallen in the fruitless assaults, unburied, with the object of causing pestilence. The infirm and wounded of Los Remedios were burned in the building which served them as hospital, and those who attempted to escape were driven back at the point of the bayonet. LiÑan forced two hundred prisoners to demolish the embankments of the fortress of their own party; and then tied them to tree trunks in the forest that they might be shot for target practice. OrdoÑez in Jilotepec shot one hundred and twenty-three prisoners, including wounded and children, by thirties, at the edge of a ditch, in the Cerro del Calvario; first causing the wounded to be carried thither on the shoulders of the uninjured.

UNCERTAINTY AND GAMING.

This atmosphere, pure and luminous, full of slumberous breezes in the shade and of debilitating heat in the sunshine, capricious and treacherous, not only has an influence upon the physiology, pathology, and life of the Mexicans, but it gives to much of their labor an unstable character. In fact, as permanent rivers are few in those great plains, and as those which exist are due to rain, the sowings of the rainy season, which are the more important, and their fruition, where there are no rivers, demand rains. But since, on the other hand, deforestation, carried on since the vice-reinal days, has been destructive, not only are lacking forests and groups of trees, which, as thermal centres uniformly distributed over the higher plateau, might give shelter to the sowings against the chill of night and early morning, or which, in the guise of fences of foliage, might intercept the cold blasts of northers; but also, through their lack, rains have become rare and irregular, there being regions where they have failed for six, seven, and eight consecutive years; as happened in the Mezquital of the state of Hidalgo, the Llano district of Chihuahua, and the north of the state of Nuevo Leon in the years 1887 to 1895. In 1892 and 1893 the drought was general and desolated a great part of the Central Plateau.

When the season of rains arrives, the fields are transformed in a single week, and where was a barren and arid horizon, there extends itself a mantle of tender verdure with corn-fields and springing wheat, which from day to day develop, open their spikes to the sun, and seem to cast back to it its last rays, as golden oceans, ruffled by the evening breeze. The laborers busy themselves in guarding them; but an unseasonable hailstorm destroys them, or a blast, sudden and nocturnal, from the north freezes them in the very months of August and September; that is to say, when surrounded by summer haze, or under a cloud sprinkled with twinkling stars, the laborers believe their crops secure and slumber, lulled by the most pleasing anticipations. When they wake the corn is lost; in twenty-four hours they pass from wealth to misery; the herd perishes; field labor stops; the laborers go forth to rob on the highways, to swell the ranks of the insurgents, or to beg on the street, according to the character of the government. Before the days of the railroads, droughts were the cause of local insurrections, which today are impossible, because grain may be transported from one district to another—or even to the whole country from a foreign land, as happened in 1894, when $30,000,000 worth of American maize was imported. However, the evil is not easily remediable, and a general drought, or a series of local dry seasons, might, as BÚlnes indicates, mortally wound our nascent nationality. Agriculture then, thanks to the droughts of the fields on the one hand, but to the abrupt atmospheric changes on the other, escapes calculation and prevision; and there are converted into an enterprise as insecure as mining, labors which have ever constituted the principal honest means of livelihood for Mexicans.

* * * *

In fine, and ever due, wholly or in part, to the atmosphere, the Mexican of the Central Plateau—and so much the less as the altitude of the region where he lives is greater—has never been able to count upon the future, either for his life, or for his health, or for his fields, or for his mines, or for his daily bread; and the apparent lack of uniformity in the phenomena of nature, experienced through generations, has developed in him finally a standard of judgment, composed of simple coexistences, which, in turn, has forged the fixed belief that all in nature is uncertain and capricious. As a logical consequence, there has arisen an unconquerable tendency toward the only manner in his power for reproducing in the same unpredictable form the contingencies of fortune and misfortune of life, so far at least as concerns wealth and misery—that is, to gaming; and thus may be explained the extent of this vice in Mexico.

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 and are the chief causes of disorders; they form the ancient class of Mexican leperos; from their bosom the ranks of petty thieves and pickpockets are recruited, and they are the industrious plotters of important crimes. They are insensible to moral suffering, and physical suffering pains them but little, and pleasures give them little joy. Venereal disease and abortion render the women of the group refractory to motherhood; paternity is impossible on account of the promiscuity in which they live; these two natural springs of altruism destroyed, they are indifferent to humane sentiments and egoistic in the animal fashion.

Everywhere they may be seen, the repulsive feature of our streets. In speaking they reveal a dwarfed intelligence, as sadly ruined by their life as is their body. Their ideas are rudimentary notions derived from the common talk of the streets, comments on public events—the escape of one criminal, the sentence of another, the deportation of their companions, the capture of some “crook.” They are godless, with feeble superstition regarding the saints depicted on their scapulars or the medal of the rosary, which they wear beneath their filthy shirt. Their number is enormous; they constitute the dregs of the laboring classes, and their presence betrays the vortices of vice, where the outcasts of civilization are dragged down.