We made rather a curious observation in this prison.  When one enters such a place in Europe, one expects to see in a moment, by the faces and demeanour of the occupants, that most of them belong to a special criminal class, brought up to a life of crime which is their only possible career, belonging naturally to police-courts and prisons, herding together when out of prison in their own districts and their own streets, and carefully avoided by the rest of society.  You may know a London thief when you see him; he carries his profession in his face and in the very curl of his hair.  Now in this prison there was nothing of the kind to be seen.  The inmates were brown Indians and half-bred Mexicans, appearing generally to belong to the poorest class, but just like the average of the people in the streets outside.  As my companion said, “If these fellows are thieves and murderers, so are our servants, and so is every man in a serape we meet in the streets, for all we can tell to the contrary.”  There was positively nothing at all peculiar about them.

If they had been all Indians we might have been easily deceived.  Nothing can be more true than Humboldt’s observation that the Indian face differs so much from ours that it is only after years of experience that a European can learn to distinguish the varieties of feature by which character can be judged of.  He mistakes peculiarities which belong to the race in general for personal characteristics; and the thickness of the skin serves still more to mask the expression of their faces.  But the greater part of these men were Mexicans of mixed Indian and Spanish blood, and their faces are pretty much European.

The only explanation we could give of this identity of character inside the prison and outside is not flattering to the Mexican people, but I really believe it to be true.  We came to the conclusion that the prisoners did not belong to a class apart, but that they were a tolerably fair specimen of the poorer population of the table-lands of Mexico.  They had been more tempted than others, or they had been more unlucky, and that was why they were here.

There were perhaps a thousand prisoners in the place, two men to one woman.  Their crimes were—­one-third, drunken disturbance and vagrancy; another third, robberies of various kinds; a fourth, wounding and homicides, mostly arising out of quarrels; leaving a small residue for all other crimes.

Our idea was confirmed by many foreigners who had lived long in the country and had been brought into personal contact with the people.  Every Mexican, they said, has a thief and a murderer in him, which the slightest provocation will bring out.  This of course is an exaggeration, but there is a great deal of truth in it.  The crimes in the prison-calendar belong as characteristics to the population in general.  Highway-robbery, cutting and wounding in drunken brawls, and deliberate assassination, are offences which prevail