These places profess to smelt ore from one or two little mines in the neighbourhood, but their real object is no secret.

They buy the stolen bits of rich ore from the Indian labourers, giving exactly half the value for it.
Of course, we must not judge these Mexican labourers as though we had a very high standard of honesty at home.

That we should see workmen searched habitually in England, at the doors of our national dock-yards, is a much greater disgrace to us.

And not merely a disgrace, but a serious moral evil, for to expose an honest man to such a degradation is to make him half a thief already.
People who know the Indian population best assure us that their lives are a perpetual course of intrigue and dissimulation.

Always trying to practise some small fraud upon their masters, and even upon their own people, they are in constant fear that every one is trying to overreach them.