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.
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.