Land Without Chimneys by Alfred Oscar Coffin - HTML preview

CHAPTER XXI.
 POLITICAL ECONOMY.

LIFE is extremely hard in Mexico. The absence of fuel and water places her industries at a great disadvantage, and to foster her crude industries she is compelled to put a prohibitory tariff on imports, which falls heavily upon the consumer. A reciprocity treaty with the United States would solve the problem, but who ever heard of the American Congress agreeing upon subjects of great importance. When I first went to Mexico each state collected its own custom duties independent of the national government, and custom officials met the train at every state line. I knew a lady who moved from Kansas to Nueva Leon, the second state across the border, and on a silver water-pitcher valued at $35, she paid an ad valorem duty of $17.15. The custom regulations have changed now, and duty is no longer collected by individual states, but it is bad enough as it is. American ham in Mexico costs fifty cents a pound, cheese seventy-five cents, canned salmon one dollar a can, and mackerel twenty-five cents each.

Through the kindness of D. Appleton & Co., I am permitted to use some figures below, taken from that very excellent work by David A. Welles, “A Study of Mexico.”

“In 1885, an American living in the City of Mexico induced the landlady to order an American cooking-stove. In due time the stove arrived, and this is a copy of the bill presented and paid upon delivery:

ORIGINAL INVOICE:

IMPORT DUTIES:

RESUME:

[NOTE.—This stove was shipped from El Paso in a lot of goods for Messrs. —— & Co., the largest importing house in Mexico, thereby saving the expense of two-thirds the consular fees—$14-56—which, if paid on the invoice alone, would have added $9 71 to charges and raised the total to $117 49.]

In 1878 Hon. John W. Foster, then United States Minister to Mexico, in a communication to the Manufacturers’ Association of the Northwest, (Chicago) thus analyzed the items of cost, in the City of Mexico, of a tierce weighing gross 328 pounds, containing 300 pounds (net) of sugar cured hams:

Therefore, $1 in hams in New York was worth $2.82 in Mexico, or 31 cents per pound! A similar analysis showed that an invoice of ten kegs of cut nails, which cost in New York $22.50, when imported into the City of Mexico cost $141.64, or $1 value in nails in New York was equal to $6.29 in Mexico, and salt that cost $2 a barrel in New York, cost $20.40 in Mexico. These are simply specimens of tariff duty, but the internal revenue system is no less remarkable.

Every inhabitant of the republic who sells goods to the value of $20 must give the buyer an invoice of same, and affix and cancel a stamp of corresponding value. Retail sales are exempt from this law so long as they are less than $20. Retail sellers in the market, or others whose capital does not exceed $300, are exempt. Tickets of all descriptions, railroad, theatre, etc., must have a stamp, also each page of the report of meetings; each leaf of a merchant’s ledger, cash or day book, and every cigar sold separately must be delivered to the buyer in a stamped wrapper. Sales of spirits pay 3 per cent; gross receipts of railroads (city) 4 per cent; public amusements, 2 per cent of entrance fees; playing cards 50 per cent, and mercantile drafts pay a dollar on the hundred. Each beef animal on leaving a town pays 50 cents; each fat pig, 25 cents; each sheep, 12 cents; and everything else you can mention.

A miller in Mexico has to pay thirty-two separate taxes on his wheat, from the time it leaves his field till he can offer it to his customers as flour. The country swarms with officials who collect taxes from every conceivable source, fandangos, christenings, marriages, funerals, buryings, etc., while you live, and then collect taxes on your grave after you are dead. It is very much like a case I knew in Texas when a man was sentenced to prison for life, and the judge found that he had overlooked one indictment, so he promptly added ten years. I am puzzled to know if this taxation gave rise to the belief in the transmigration of souls, or whether the belief in transmigration gave the cue to the officials to collect from the shades. Perhaps this delinquent tax is charged to the estate of Purgatory et al. Every man between the ages of 18 and 66 is taxed for the privilege of living, and the only way to escape this tax is to live in Vera Cruz and die young. Poor old Mexico.

I might devote ten pages to this subject, but what is the use? A country with such a prohibitive tariff shuts out her only source of revenue on imports, and exports nothing of importance but money, so how can she survive except by robbing the people? The country is very poor, the State of South Carolina producing two and a half times as much as the entire northern half of Mexico, and if you compare them by proportionate areas, twenty-five times as much. The interminable system of taxation is the most despicable system on American soil.

I have at last discovered why so many beggars go naked in Mexico. They go naked and beg in order to escape the tax gatherer, since a man is taxed on clothes and material and upon all incomes greater than $150. History tells of a certain people that brought on a revolution and a republic, just on account of such harmless pastime as licking stamps. The time will come in Mexico when the people will lick just one stamp too many, then they will rise in their might and stamp the industry in the ground. (Joke not intended).