In 1819 Florida was added to these newly acquired domains and in 1848 Texas and New Mexico and Arizona and California and Nevada and Utah were taken away from Mexico; and less than a hundred years after it had seemed certain that the northern half of the continent was to be a hinterland of two Latin powers, it had completely changed hands and had become an extension of the great north European plain.
As for the subsequent economic development of those heterogeneous parts which the chances of war, but above all things the indifference and lack of foresight of the original owners, had so suddenly and unexpectedly thrown together, it took on such proportions as the world had never seen. As soon as the first railroads had been constructed and the first steamers had been built, hundreds of thousands of immigrants followed the water routes to the Great Lakes or crossed the Alleghenies to take their share of the Great Plains and make them ready for human habitation and raise that wheat which was to make Chicago the most important grain center of the world.
When the triangle between the Great Lakes, the Alleghenies and the foothills of the Rockies were found to contain coal and oil and iron and copper in unprecedented quantities, this region became the great factory area of the new commonwealth with cities like Pittsburgh and Cincinnati and St. Louis and Cleveland and Detroit and Buffalo attracting laborers from all over the world to assist the earlier arrivals in exploiting these hidden treasures. And as these towns needed harbors from which to export their steel and iron and their oil and then automobiles, the old colonial settlements of the Atlantic seaboard, New york and Boston and Philadelphia and Baltimore achieved positions of eminence which they had never enjoyed before.
Meanwhile the southern states, at last emerging from the dark days of the reconstruction period (infinitely more disastrous than the Civil War itself had been), were scraping together enough money to begin raising their cotton crops without the assistance of slave labor. Galveston and Savannah and New Orleans returned to life. The railroads and telegraph lines and telephone wires turned the whole nation into one enormous farm and factory. 60,000,000 Europeans crossed the ocean in less than half a century and joined the earlier arrivals in planning and building and making and selling and such a workshop as they set up the world had never seen before. But neither had Nature ever given a nation such unlimited opportunities as we enjoyed – a gigantic plain with an excellent climate and an excellent soil, protected on both sides by convenient mountain-ranges and practically uninhabited – almost inexhaustible resources – handywater-ways to which history had added an almost more important gift, one nation and one language and no past.
What these advantages really mean to a nation we realize as soon as we go a little further down south and reach Mexico and Central America. Mexico, with the exception of the peninsula of yucatan, where the ancient Mayans lived, is a mountainous region which slowly increases in height from the Rio Grande towards the south until in the plateau of Sierra Madre and that of Anáhuac it reaches peaks of sixteen and seventeen thousand feet. Most of these higher mountains like Popocatepetl (17,543 feet) and Orizaba (18,564) and Ixtaccihuatl (16,960) are of volcanic origin, but Colima (13,092) is the only active volcano at the present moment.
On the Pacific side, the Sierra Madre rises sharply from the coast; but on the Atlantic side the mountains slope down more gradually and since the European invaders came from the east it was easy enough for them to find their way to the interior. The advance guard arrived during the first years of the sixteenth century. That was the time of Spain’s great disappointment because the new discoveries of that damnable Genoese had proved to be a flop, a howling failure, no gold, no silver, naked savages who lay down and died when you tried to make them work and endless mosquitoes.
Then rumor began to spread that beyond the mountains of the nearby mainland there lived an emperor of a people called the Aztecs, who dwelled in golden castles and slept in golden beds and ate from golden plates. Ferdinand Cortez and his three hundred adventurers landed in Mexico in the year 1519. With the help of one dozen cannon and thirteen blunderbusses he conquered the whole realm of poor Montezuma who was strangled to death ere he could witness the complete annihilation of what only a short time before had been a nation not much less efficiently administered than the realm of the Habsburg monarch in whose name he was murdered.
After that and for almost 300 years, until 1810 to be exact Mexico remained a Spanish colony and was treated as suck Several of her native products were no longer allowed to be cultivated for fear that they might compete with the less acceptable products of the mother country. And most of the wealth which the soil produced disappeared into the pockets of a few rich landowners, or was set apart for the benefit of those religious establishment which even to-day are fighting to retain their hold upon the common lands.
Then, during the middle of last century, shortly after the grotesque adventure of poor Austrian Maximilian, who had hoped to become Montezuma’s successor with the help of the French, it was discovered that Mexico was not only a very rich agricultural country but that her soil contained as much or perhaps more inn and oil deposits than the United States. Thereupon the 15,000,000 Mexicans, of whom nearly 40% were still of pure Indian stock, were almost as badly off as they had been when Cortez first visited them. For now the big banking interests took a hand in their internal affairs and arranged for revolutions, which were then answered by counter-revolutions on the part of the natives, until the record of a hundred years (it averages twenty revolutions per year) was broken just before the Great War and it seemed that the whole country would dissolve into murder and bloodshed. Fortunately during the Great War, when the big financial interest were otherwise occupied (that war cost a great deal of money), Mexico had a breathing space and today a few strong men at trying to undo the harm of three centuries of neglect and sickness and analphabetism and apparently with success, for Vera Cruz and Tampico (the two harbours on the Gulf) are reporting larger and larger export figures. For half a dozen years Washington and Mexico City have not merely been on speaking terms, but have actually spoken to each other almost politely and with a smile.