CHAPTER VI

MEXICO AND HER “BOLSHEVISM”

Ten years ago Mexico was one of the great, progressive nations of the world; to-day she is just “another Latin American Republic.” Then she showed literally the achievement and the promise of Japan; to-day she is as backward and as hopeless as Turkey. Ten years ago her diplomats were honored in the councils of kings, her credit ranked with that of the best of Europe, her cities were miniatures of Paris, her mines operated with the perfection of those in England, her railways and budding industries bore comparison with those of the United States, her people lived in arcadian peace, wakening slowly and surely, if sometimes painfully, to a civilization which was meeting their needs. To-day, Mexico is a little worse than Turkey, a little better than Hayti, her diplomats are as inconsequential as those of Thibet, her credit is as low as that of Austria, her cities and ports are mud puddles and pest holes, her mines are back to the rat-hole workings of the colonial Spaniards and Indians, her railroads are rattling skeletons, her industries virtually non-existent. Life is again arcadian, with all those discomforts of Arcadia which the poets of old and the propagandists of to-day neglect, so carefully, to mention.

The world has learned, in these past years, to take colossal destructions calmly, so that few of us wonder and none of us really questions the fact or the why of Mexico’s sudden and astounding degeneration. And yet that failure is in miniature the threat and the promise of the failure of our civilization, in epitome the boast of bolshevism and the nightmare of capitalism. Mexico is like the Chamber of Horrors at the old Eden Musee or Mme. Tussaud’s, a row of illuminated pictures which tell in ghastly realism what is sure to happen to careless people if they play too recklessly with the world which is given them to use.

This seems indeed a cycle of bolshevism, but it is a cycle in which radicalism, like capitalism, is a sorry victim. As a picture the events in Mexico approximate the drama in Russia, carried to the logical conclusions which such a drama would reach on any national stage where personal aggrandizement is a mightier lodestone than public devotion. The historical facts of the past decade in Mexico are unrelated to the facts and background of Russia, yet in Mexico there have been heard the same shibboleths, the same promises, the same cries of the downtrodden. There have been seen the same red flags, the same uprisings and assassinations, and the same “redistribution” of property as in Russia. And more than all has unrolled the drama of the rising of obscure chieftains and politicians to colossal and wicked power. But in Mexico the cycle has gone far beyond Russia, perhaps because here there has, indeed, been no touch of even such idealism as there may be in Moscow.

In Mexico the crimson day of bolshevism has been followed quickly by the purple twilight of the aftermath of graft and privilege. To-day there is to be seen there a power of wealth mightier than any which is conceivable in the now almost forgotten dawn of bolshevism’s red day in Mexico. Privilege and not the proletariat, capitalism and not socialism, are the gods of that stricken land,--a land which ten years ago was mistress of her life and of her destiny, and to-day is a beggar in the marts of the world, ready to sell her body and her soul for gold.

I have no desire to force a parallel between the early events in Mexico and those in Russia. The parallel is there, and could fill the eye and mind with the aid of a modicum of imagination. But the facts alone are eloquent, and the primary fact is not whether the revolution against the czar was day for day and hour for hour a repetition of the Madero revolution against Diaz, or whether Huerta was an Indian Denekin, or Carranza a weak Lenin or Obregon the realization of what Trotzky might be to-morrow or next year. The first fact and the last is that in one great section of Mexico we have seen and in the whole of Mexico we are to-day watching the rolling on of an ugly spiral from plutocracy to revolution, from revolution to socialism, from socialism to bolshevism and then from bolshevism to demagogy, to a later and darker dictatorship, with a more miserable proletariat, and on into the vast sweep of an age of privilege which holds and wields power greater than government, greater and more direct than capital or labor has ever wielded. For privilege stands alone in the midst of the smoking ruins of what was once the Mexican nation.

He braves much in this day who dares define or limit bolshevism, but in Mexico its manifestations have been carried to a point where they have limited and defined themselves. First, Mexican bolshevism was and is the application of political remedies to economic ills; second, it is the raising up of the proletariat by promises and agitation to the overturning of established government and the setting up, not of the promised millennium, but of new dictatorships and new oppressions. Both sought, and claim, the improvement of the workers, but both have failed and faded to shadowy appearance and raucous boast.

In Mexico to-day there are spots where peace and progress reign--but they are literally those spots where “capitalism,” entrenched behind a wall of gold and foreign protection, has been able to give its workers the value of the profits which they gain. The rest of Mexico is worse off, politically and economically, than in the days of Diaz, and increasingly the only hope of the country seems, by some means, to achieve the extension of sane business to the replacement of the economic ruin of native demagogues masquerading behind the fair words of socialism.

The essence of the beneficent effects of this foreign business has been the education of the Mexicans whom it touches toward broader horizons of living and personal efficiency. For actually the history of Mexico’s downfall is a history of the failure of her education, of the failure of the past governments of Mexico to utilize the forces which were at their hand for the uplift and the development of the unhappy masses of the people. That failure of the past has become a colossal catastrophe in the days of present and past revolution.

For their day and time, Spain and the Roman Catholic church did much for Mexico. We do not know what the Church might have done if it had had different, more educational ideals, but we do know that, save for the work of the Protestant missions in the past thirty years, hardly any other force but Rome has done anything for social improvement in Mexico. We do not know what Anglo-Saxon educational and economic leadership would have done in the place of that of the Spaniards and mixed-bloods--such comparisons are necessarily academic. But we do know that under the Spanish viceroys and under Diaz more was done toward improving the material welfare and toward building the foundations of material and moral prosperity for the unfortunate peons than has been done or even sincerely attempted in the ten years of revolutionary rule since the fall of Diaz.

Mexico has been, and indeed is, what we sometimes call in our brusque Americanism, a “white man’s country.” It is essentially one of the spots in this world where the burden of uplift is the white man’s burden. For 300 years white Spaniards sought to lift it, and in that long effort, with all its failures, they placed Mexico, even with her six millions of unlettered, superstitious Indians, in the category of the white lands. The duty of the white man, imperialist or socialist as he may be, has ever been two-fold, and its duality has been its power; we have lifted the material plane of our wards and we have upraised those wards themselves to a higher and yet higher mental and spiritual plane.

It is this dual duty that the revolutionists of Mexico have shirked and have scouted. The economic rain of the country is to-day almost complete, and its spiritual uplift has been halted as by a wall of flame. From those material ruins, Mexico might conceivably rise in a spiritual rebirth, but the fact has been otherwise, for the material ruin has been accomplished by the prostitution of all the ideals, all the sacred faiths of men, concentrated by self-seeking bandit governments to the aggrandizement and the enrichment of a few sodden favorites.

I would, if I could, paint a different picture, but the half lights of such a panorama can be added only after the dull background has been set in. And that background is dark indeed. The panorama of misery begins when one crosses the northern border to-day. There the scattered but once almost happy villages of other times have been replaced by ruined, roofless railway stations lined with starving vendors of food who fight with the bony dogs for the refuse of the very food they sell. All the long trip to Mexico City is marked by the same voiceless suffering, and the capital itself has a dismal dinginess that cries of hopeless misery, in appalling contrast to the gallant days of the Diaz “materialism.”

The unhappy toll of war and revolution, one says? Yes, in part, for such “war” as Mexico has known always takes that toll and always, too, from the weaklings, putting starvation and sickness and filth and dismay where once were comfort and health and some cleanliness and happiness.

But, again the question, was it not worth the price, will it not be worth the price, in the victories won for human freedom? And here the answer is unequivocably “No.”

Many hoped, with the fine faith of their own sincerity, that the upheaval which followed Diaz was the dawning of a new era. But in that hope even those who knew Mexico forgot the Mexicans and their history. Political independence from Spain had been won, freedom from the domination of religious bigotry had been won, before Diaz came. The struggle of his day was one of uplift, carried on with faulty tools, perhaps, but slowly reaching toward the light. Living was improving, slowly; religion was improving, slowly; education was advancing, slowly. Then came a period of crystallization; the Diaz oligarchy grew old. Many sincere men, inside and outside Mexico, thought that the advance could and should move more rapidly. Diaz repressed those hastening reformers, and the spiritual force which finally broke forth into the Madero revolution of 1910-11 was undoubtedly the result of that repression of progressive thought.

Like all the revolutions of Mexico’s stormy history, this one began with a beautiful stating of ideals and of the unrealized needs of the common man; but as with all those other revolutions, the power passed quickly to the hands of men whose sole “ideal” was personal aggrandizement, personal wealth, and ruin to all whose needs might incommode these exalted “leaders.”

The so-called “social revolution” of Mexico borrowed the battle cries of European socialism, but in the land in which it worked it stirred up only a tempest in a teapot, with the miserable masses of the country serving as tinder and fuel beneath the vessel. The teapot is the diminutive organized labor world of Mexico, and that is boiling more violently, perhaps, than elsewhere. But to-day the “advanced” ideas of Mexico serve, in the name of socialism, only to put sweeping power into the hands of unscrupulous men, men who know and care nothing of the responsibilities of power, and are using it only to the destruction of the very bases of Mexican society.

Thus, while there seems to be a light dawning in the labor world of Mexico, I am not sure that the light does not come from the burning of something which Mexico cannot afford to lose. In that organized labor world there are fewer than 50,000 workers out of a population of 15,000,000, while there are more than 3,000,000 peons, heads of families, who work, when there is work, in the fields, or as common laborers. It is upon the continued, unbroken suffering of these 3,000,000 that the 50,000 profit to-day--the peons have but changed masters once again and in the name of freedom, now, serve a vaster company. The Mexican leaders, drawing their power in turn from the coherent, organized industrial workers, are to-day destroying the civilization of Diaz, and with it the civilization of American business men, American teachers and American missionaries, which was and is the hope of the downtrodden majority. The “modern” laws which labor has promulgated might, we may conceive, fit the advanced industrial life of Germany or the United States, but they are utterly suicidal to Mexico. The new Constitution of 1917 has written into its fabric an idealistic set of labor laws, beautiful in terminology but under present conditions of industry and psychology and government in Mexico, about as impractical for the development of industry and the true welfare of labor as they are efficient as a means of graft and extortion against labor as well as against employers. These laws are worked out for the sole benefit of the industrial workers of Mexico, that total of less than 50,000 as against the 3,000,000 farm and day laborers. They are thus far more important as a propaganda document with the foreign radicals who caused the inclusion of those administrative laws in the new national constitution than they are helpful to Mexico’s own social advancement.

The eight-hour day provided in the constitution, the welfare projects such as the stern proviso that nursing mothers shall have two half-hour periods per day in which to care for their children, the constitutional support of the right to strike even in public utilities, and the virtual provision against the employment of strikebreakers, or the closing of a shop in a lock-out, are typical of the privileges for labor--they cover everything which the most radical would make the laws of every land. In Mexico, and under the peculiar conditions of Mexican psychology and inter-class relationships, they become little more than tools of the demagogues. The rulers do as they choose in any case, as when, not long ago, a railway strike was successful to the last detail of the demands made in the name of “the social revolution” and two months later a similar strike for similar ends was opposed by the general use of strikebreakers. The labor courts, theoretically a great advance, are used almost without exception as a palladium of radical propaganda--and as a toll-gate on the road of privilege.

Such are the reforms of the new era. They provide six or eight hour days, for men who cannot read and whose children are not taught to read or to think. They provide minimum wages, to be determined by factory committees, with the most ignorant workmen in the world on a par with employers and industrial engineers. They provide against discharge for any cause except proven drunkenness, in a land where, to say the least, drunkenness is relative.

Their own people have begun, a little, to wonder at the wisdom of these sweeping changes, and one, Ing. Carlos Arroyo, not long ago wrote in the official but very radical “Bulletin of Industry, Commerce and Labor” that there were four main difficulties which would have to be corrected before factory efficiency could be arranged in Mexico on a coöperative basis: first, scientific method would have to replace the empirical system now in use; second, there would have to be special training for apprentices; third, there would have to be study of employees to have them properly placed; fourth, the responsibility for the tasks assigned would have to be “equally” divided (not given entirely to the workers) between the management and the workers, “because the former continues to be charged with the responsibility for the competence of the latter.”

And as to that competence, this same bulletin regularly publishes the records of accidents. There one will find that in 1918, for instance, there were, in 278 industrial establishments having 292,364 employees, 6,424 accidents, in which 184 were killed, and 42 maimed and 6,198 wounded. And, most illuminating of all, 5,165 of the accidents were admittedly due to the “carelessness of workmen,” only 195 were the fault of the management and 1,064 were due to unavoidable causes.

As to the value of the achieved reforms, I have but this to tell: In all the cities, in the centers of industry like the Tampico oil fields and the busy port of Vera Cruz (busier to-day than it has ever been because all Mexico must live on imported goods) I found a sullen hatred of the foreigner, an ugly self-assertion that bodes but ill for those missionaries of religion and of business to whom we look for so much of the future regeneration of the country. I saw none of the contented, happy calm of prosperous laborers, but only the unrest of the great cities of other lands, ugly with resentment, fertile field for revolution but not for progress. And yet those very resentful workers, convinced of an unappreciated importance which they knew but by rote, are all that there is of the “fruits” of the “social revolution” in Mexico.

No, Mexico has not changed, even amongst her petted laboring classes, and I fear that the old rule of our ancient civilization will have to persist a little longer, and the long, dim road be trod again through failure and reform, and failure again and yet again. I fear that we shall still have to lift by reaching down and, by training the dull forces of those dull minds, teach them to help themselves and to climb by themselves.

Out on the plantations the workers are going the rounds which they have covered since Mexico began, and in the fairs I saw the only evidence of happiness which smile on one in the length and breadth of the country. The market places and the fairs of Mexico, sunny, crowded, colorful, rich because the Indians in the booths are close to Nature and Nature’s bounty! That simple happiness has been the source of all Mexico’s joy--and of all her misfortune. That simplicity has made her people the dupes of predatory chieftains, and hideous priests of pre-Spanish times, of Spaniard and priest through the long centuries of the viceroys, of master and of some priests, too, through the years since the Independence. Yet in those periods those who have duped the Indians have, most of them, protected the Indians in an easy, medieval way, and slowly there has grown a civilization, and in that civilization have been nurtured the seeds of better things.

The time was coming for those seeds to bear fruit, when, hastening the ripening, came the revolutions of 1910 and after. It was like the child who pulled up the stalks to see how the seeds were growing--they were growing much faster than appeared on the surface, but they did not grow after they were pulled up.

Looking back to the Diaz day we can find, for instance, the slow, constructive work toward the creation of arable land for small farms. It was being hampered somewhat by grasping office-holders, but it was advancing, a great national plan of irrigation to make possible the use of small tracts in a country where rain conditions have forever made small farming all but impossible. Then the revolution and the resounding cry for “land.” The alleged land hunger of the Mexican Indians and peons has been at once the rallying cry for each succeeding revolution and the one appeal of all of them for foreign sympathy.

But whatever authorities may conceive as to the facts of the existence of this land hunger or of the forms which it takes--a desire for little farms, for prehistoric communal ownership, or for property only because it is wealth and can be converted into cash--it is also true that the schemes of the revolutionists for land distribution have been impossible except by the confiscation of rich properties and the destruction of vested rights. Obviously, no land which is not tillable is satisfactory for distribution, and the tillable land of Mexico is, as I have pointed out, actually only about 25,000,000 acres, or one-twentieth of the area of the country. Land distribution must long remain largely a beautiful theory, good only for raising up the natives by direct appeal to their bitter poverty or to their human greed, and for the raising up of foreign sympathy by the flaunting of the misfortunes of the soil under more appealing names.

In Mexico to-day all these dreams of land distribution have gone the way of other “reforms” for the benefit of the peons. Nothing, virtually, has been done. Some great properties have been confiscated, or “paid for” in unguaranteed bonds of bankrupt state governments, but most of such properties are to-day in the hands of former revolutionary “generals.” Some few have been distributed to Indians, but even these tracts are taken with but scant enthusiasm. One great “land distribution” in Yucatan called forth a crowd of 6,000 to the festival (all Mexico goes to any _fiesta_) but only thirty Indians took up any of the hundreds of small tracts offered.

The essential facts of the Mexican situation are patent to all who go to Mexico to-day, and they are inescapable to those who have a background of knowledge of Mexico by which to judge of what they see. And yet it is true that in the councils of Carranza, in the entourages of de la Huerta and of Obregon there have been men representing forces which we in our time have felt could not be used to evil purpose. These were men who had been stirred by the fine frenzy of the first revolution, and whose ideas, caught as mere phrases by the leaders of revolts, were handed back to their originators again, as the “ideals” of the revolution. Strange indeed it is, and yet not only newcomers, but foreigners of long residence and sincere and devoted Mexicans as well, fell victims to that subtle flattery. In business, in education, in the churches, there were such men, their very hopes too great to protect them from the petty deceits of those who climbed to power upon them.

I think I can understand why travelers in Mexico, sincere students as well as moistily entertained excursions of American “Chambers of Commerce” can be deceived as to conditions there. I have been inclined to be impatient with those who let themselves be led this way and that, and flattered by the apparent sincerity of self-deluding Mexican officials, but Mexico is, after all, an eternal enigma. It is an enigma because its colossal depths of ignorance and the smallness of its deceits are literally incomprehensible to simpler and less subtle minds.

It is that enigma which I have sought through all my writing on Mexico to resolve. On my last trip through the country, I saw just the eternal Mexico, the Mexico of ignorance and misery, whose only change was that it was a little sadder, a little more resentful of those whom it once regarded as its helpers and its friends, a little more pompous in parading its borrowed intellectual plumage.

A most perfect example of this ability of the Mexican of the “modern” type to absorb one’s ideas and deceive one by the redishing of those ideas, happened to me on my last trip to Mexico City. In the course of the preparation of an article on a great business for a popular magazine, I met a Mexican _licenciado_ (a title of vast elegance, meaning much more than its dictionary equivalent of “lawyer”) who was extremely anxious to be quoted as an expert on the subject which I was studying. He evidently thought that my quoting him would help him to a government post to which he aspired, so he expounded his ideas at great length. When he was finished, I answered his arguments in kind, and with considerable interest in his response to my counter-play. He was pleasantly combative, and we parted in thorough friendship.

It was only a few hours later that I had an urgent call from this same gentleman, who had, he told me, been going into new material on the subject, and wished to express his views, stated in the morning, more definitely to me. Whereupon he returned me, recooked and eloquently served, my own friendly contentions of the previous interview. It was a bit thick for me, but it is worth the telling that an American business man of long experience in Mexico who had introduced this gentleman to me remarked when the subject came up again, a day or two later:

“By the way, Licenciado Blank is getting much broader. He has figured out a pretty decent attitude on this problem ...” and he redished me my own views again!

This is Mexico to-day. On the top a group of men who have absorbed in just this way the phrases of the intelligent radicals of the world but who still remain, as always, sycophants without background of education, or even genuine radical convictions. Below them the vast misery of the unthinking serfs of the country, duller, certainly sadder and even less well nourished than in the days of the viceroys and of Diaz.

We are all responsible for the Mexico which is before us. We Americans of every type in that old Mexico were too willing to let the misery of Mexico be what it was, were too willing to take our helpers and our support from the middle classes which were emerging so slowly. We made a fetish of that middle class, built our hope of Mexico upon it, called it the crowning achievement of the age of Diaz, and from it came the beginnings of that group of Mexican leaders of which we all had dreamed. We saw Diaz clear--all of us, I think--and knew that his day could not be forever. But we had faith in that middle class, forgetting, as it was easy to forget, the instability of that foundation of Indian poverty and misery. We were going to transmute those shifting sands by making more striking the examples of its brothers--artisans and clerks and students and teachers. We trusted so blindly, then, in the leaven of example--we knew so little of the sodden flour which made our loaves.

And then came the day of revolution, Madero the deliverer. There were few of us who regretted the passing of Diaz, save sentimentally, that it should have to be in just that way--we had hoped he would die gloriously, beloved by the people for whom he had given so much. And then the disappointment and the horror of that wild cabal of graft and loot under Madero, when the dreamers, the repressed brains of a generation, stood waiting, wringing their hands in helpless impotence--those who could, truly, have done so much! It was pitiful, as was the aftermath of Huerta, the reaction, the impossible reaction with its ugly tinge of a coming uprush of Indian barbarism.

Then Carranza, riding upon the winged horse of Madero--it seems that not all of us understood, quite, for we heard the fair words, as we have heard them echoing through empty halls and across dead and tortured bodies these five years since. Many sincere men were caught by those fair, echoing words, and many followed the phantom to the end. And many continue to this day.

I have no need to talk of the recent past, nor of the present. The story is written in the starving babies of the Mexican towns, in the dismal railway stations where wretched food can be bought (if one dares) from the very mouths of hungry, filthy vendors. Misery and grief and pain stalk in Mexico to-day. Somewhere those who have used these wretched bodies, as infinite in number, as minute in importance, as the skeletons of a coral reef, for climbing to wealth and power--somewhere these must make answer.

In another chapter I shall tell something of the story of Yucatan, where the ideas of radical socialism were accepted and then used to destroy even itself. It is a story of horror and of wreckage, the clearest picture of Mexican conditions at their ultimate which has passed in the gory panorama of the recent years.

What has happened in Yucatan is in essence what has been going on all over Mexico. In the larger field of the whole country, the revolutionists have been more coherent, and at the same time in their utterances somewhat more considerate of the prejudices of the world at large. Yucatan, isolated from the rest of Mexico, and free from the prying eyes of most of the world as well, has gone on with the round of despotism and oppression, rape and murder in the name of socialism, but on the mainland, the “rights of labor” have been more elaborately defended (in words) and the legal systems of confiscation and anti-foreignism have been more logically developed, under the standard of progressive socialism!

The years have written records of Mexican political and social revolution which are identical with those of the present in all save their battlecries. The first outbreak against Spain in 1810 and the dozens of revolutions which followed it were a _reductio ad absurdum_ of the political ideals of Thomas Paine and the American and French revolutionaries. The Constitution of 1857, under which Diaz ruled, was little more than a copy of the Constitution of the United States, and few of its provisions were really adapted to Mexico’s peculiar conditions. So it is not strange, perhaps, that the Constitution of 1917 is as far from being Mexican and far more false an effort to solve the nation’s problems than was its predecessor, for it was dictated by foreign radicals and merely adapted by the Mexican politicians who knew best what would arouse enthusiasm in the Mexican crowd.

Despite its beauties of theory and its direct appeal to the serious radical thought of the world, its most useful function is becoming obvious even to the most credulous, for it gives the governing groups that control of Mexican life by which it is possible for them to sell the privilege of doing business, because the ancient rights of business are utterly done away with. The ills of Mexico are essentially economic, and the new constitution and its revolutions, even more than their predecessors, have sought to apply only the political remedy, a remedy which has so far served only to destroy the efficiency of the economic machinery of the country and place it upon the auction-block of graft.

To-day all over Mexico, labor is paid higher wages than it ever received, but it is paying more for its food and shelter than it ever spent before. The misery of Mexico is just as obvious and as unescapable as ever to him who sees truly. Save for those sections where foreign business still survives the Mexican lives as he has always lived, on the verge of pauperism. And upon the summit of the heap, lounging in easy magnificence, is the mixed-blood agitator, the general, the governor, the cabinet official who have battened on Mexico’s misery before this day and will doubtless do so long after this day is passed.

The raising of the Indian masses of Mexico by promises and by high-sounding battlecries is a game as old as Mexican history; it is played with unvarying success year after year and generation after generation. The more extravagant the promises, the more complete the enthusiasm of the “proletariat,” both for the political movement of the moment, and for the one which follows it immediately upon the discovery by the unfortunate “people” that the previous promises are not going to be kept.

But in to-day’s orgy of revolution, Mexico has gone further toward destruction than she has ever gone before. Values throughout native Mexico are almost non-existent, and the wheels of Mexican civilization like the wheels of the wheezy locomotives of her railways, creak and groan on their rounds. The nation’s economic life is tied together by strings, and what remains is only what has been salvaged from her junk-heaps, and like the lawn-mower borrowed from a neighbor, is kept running only to serve the purposes of the borrower.

The seventy years of warfare before Diaz left intact the civilization of the Spaniards for Diaz to revive, but the ten years from Diaz to Obregon have torn that civilization to shreds. Nearly all that Diaz built has disappeared, and to-day the business of Mexico is swapping jack-knives and selling food and shelter at the highest prices the traffic will bear.

No man who would face truth in Mexico can ignore these potent facts. And the reason is not revolution, nor even mere radicalism, but the cynical application of political control to economic needs for the aggrandizement of individual leaders whose power is in the market for all who will buy the privileges which they have to offer.

It is in this condition that the importance and the menace of radical Mexican government are found. What it has seemed well to call bolshevism in Mexico has its greatest power in its mere threat against capital and business. That threat, the mere presence of the anti-capitalistic constitution and laws, has probably far greater power than their actual application would have. Once the blow of confiscation fell, the answer from the world of business and civilized government would be quick and sure--Mexico cannot be ignored as Russia can be, for Mexico lies in the center of the trade-routes of the globe, and we in the United States would feel the menace of her anarchy too strongly to remain passive.

But the static power, the threat of laws which are never enforced--there is the menace and there the great influence which creates the graft and cynicism of Mexican officials. So long as those laws remain, business, if it would survive in Mexico, must buy immunity. And it does buy it, for business is ever timid, and no single business organization and seldom a group of business organizations, will ever go to the stake for a principle. Its duty to its stockholders and to its employees makes it buy its way, not always by direct graft, but in submission to vast taxes, to unwarranted extortions, to the riding of official annoyances--rather than accept the shut-down and fight with its own great power, its inertia of movement or of the silence which ruins empires.

In recent months the great business groups in Mexico have opposed a certain amount of strength to the growing power of the auction-block of Mexican graft and privilege. The oil companies have from time to time offered a solid front to the encroachments of this marketing of the privilege of doing business in contraversion of the temporary laws of Mexico. They have held back, apparently, the crushing fall of actual enforcement of the confiscatory provisions of the Constitution of 1917, and they have, here and there, stopped the marketing of privilege--for brief periods. But looking at the whole picture, it seems as if the Mexican officials of the present era are in no greater hurry to enforce the confiscation than are the foreigners to have it enforced. The static power of those provisions, waiting to fall, is far more profitable to Mexican pockets than would be the sudden and final crash of their genuine application. Their enforcement would be of little value to the seller of privilege, for then he would have to invent another method of extortion. No, privilege will long remain upon the market counters of Mexico. It will remain there, in fact, until some means is found, within or without Mexico, for destroying the system which is so profitable. That need of change is the crisis of the business world of Mexico, the crisis of all who would do business with Mexico in the present or in the future.

What, then, can save Mexico in this crisis? The panacea of the Obregon idea was certainly not a solution. Here indeed was a probably genuine desire to solve the problem in a final and glorious way. But the tools were but the tools of the old days of Carranza and the rest. That was a political remedy for an economic condition, and its promise was a sordid thing, an unworthy thing for Mexico or for the United States to expect. For the promise of Obregon was at first for reaction, a belief that Obregon was comfortably wealthy already or that his ambition was for power alone. Therefore he was to be the great conservative, who would save Mexico by slipping back to the days of Diaz. But reaction must always fail in the end. In this case it passed quickly, for this was a “reaction” which was part and parcel of the “radicalism” of Carranza, its power but a manifestation in another form of the same personalism, the same sale of privilege, which made Carranza impossible and in the end, brought him to his ruin.

The later developments of the Obregon idea were marked by an obvious anxiety to reach a permanent solution of the immediate and pressing difficulties of Mexico, and most of all to secure recognition by the United States and financial aid from American bankers, as the _sine qua non_ of such a solution. The efforts put forth were powerful, but the driving force back of them was primarily personal ambition and the realization that only such a solution could save the happy hunting grounds of revolutionary leaders from some sort of foreign intendancy. And above and beyond and behind all, were the factors of government whose origins and whose immediate past seem indeed to be as firmly stamped upon their natures as the spots upon the leopard or his skin upon the Ethiopian.

The completed cycle of the bolshevist experiment and the arrival back at the sale of privilege links up with the failure of Obregon to offer anything but, first, a promise of reversion to reactionary czarism and, second, that unconcealed offering of privileges and promises of power to all who could or who might aid in the campaign for recognition and for foreign loans. The condition seems to me to sound a call as of Elijah for a new understanding of the Mexican problem. Carrancism might have been but an isolated interlude, might have been a mere question of observation and interpretation, if the end had not come and if business in Mexico were not continuing to pay for its sorry privileges in the same sorry way. Obregon might perhaps have been the hope for peace and happiness in Mexico if we had not had Carranza and de la Huerta and if their followers, with their cynical mouthings of all the most sacred faiths of man, were not to-day still the rulers of Mexico, still the sellers of privilege in the name of human progress.

We must, I believe, cast away the too long nurtured idea that the battle in Mexico is between the progressive thought of the day and the reactionary conservatism of great interests. I have sought here to show why this is so. A revolution which can evolve the idea of the socialization of great industry and can, in the very conception of that idea, turn it to the looting of that industry for private graft and gain, as in Yucatan; a revolution which can produce the uncontrolled radicalism of Carranza and evolve through the cynical play-acting of de la Huerta into the promise of reactionism in Obregon with all the unholy forces which supported Carranza rallying to uphold his successors--such a revolution will not, unredeemed, carry Mexico into her next era of progress and peace. Capital and socialism must alike beware. Neither should, in honesty with itself, accept a cause in Mexico until the issue is joined clear.

In the past ten years we have seen in turn the appeal of political Mexico, to-day to the bolshevist, to-morrow to the Christian missionary, to-day to the thinking radical of the universities, to-morrow to the deep-dyed conservative of the counting room. Confusion has piled upon confusion until we have each seen in Mexico what we hoped or what we feared.

We can only begin to see the truth, and in the truth the solution of the complicated Mexican problem, when we clear our minds of these old ideas that he who is against the revolutionary government in Mexico is a hopeless reactionary, and that he who is for it is a raving bolshevist. For the Mexican revolution is part of the “world revolution” only as the shibboleths of that vast upheaval have been turned to the aggrandizement of Mexican leaders who know neither what the phrases mean nor where they lead.

If this is grasped, and if we will look at Mexico as a problem for us all, then the beginning of the road away from foreign intervention and the peril to our peace and Mexico’s will begin to open. Intervention can be avoided, even though it may be grievously close to-day. But it cannot be avoided until we see clearly that the issue of intervention, like the whole issue of the Mexican revolution, is not one of capitalistic interests against the unhappy Mexican peon, but a struggle of all the constructive thinkers and workers of the world--be they radical, socialistic, religious, philosophical, laborite, capitalistic, industrial or social, be they American, English, French, Russian or Mexican--against forces of greed and ignorance which turn every ideal of honest men to the prostitution of their country and the exploitation of their fellows within and without its borders.