The constitutionalist government confronted with the sanitary and educational problems of Mexico. Addressed delivered by Alberto J. Pani to the members of the American Academy of Political and Social Science and of the Pennsylvania Arbitration and Peace Society in ... Philadelphia ... on November 10th, 1916

p

■n
3d

F

»235
Cll

BANCROFT
LIBRARY

THE LIBRARY

OF

THE UNIVERSITY

OF CALIFORNIA

The Constitutionalist Government
Confronted with the Sanitary and
Educational Problems of Mexico

Address Delivered by

ALBERTO J. PANI, C. E.

to the members of the

American Academy of Political and Social Science

and of the

Pennsylvania Arbitration and Peace Society

in

"WITHERSPOON HALL," PHILADELPHIA, PA., U. S. A.

on

Friday Evening, November 10th, 1916

Terminal Pump Building, "Water TVorks, Mexico
City. General Director: Manuel Marroquin y
Rivera, C. E. Arcliitect, Alberto J. Pani, C. E.

Published by

LATIN-AMERICAN NEWS ASSOCIATION
1400 Broadway, New York City

Does Mexico Interest You?

Then you should read the following pamphlets:

What the Catholic Church Has Done for Mexico, by Doctor.

Paganel > $0.10

The Agrarian Law of Yucatan j

The Labor Law of Yucatan

International Labor Forum ;.••,*•«; ^

Intervene in Mexico, Not to Make, but to End War, urges ( q ^5

Mr. Hearst, with reply by Rolland. )

The President's Mexican Policy, by F. K. Lane

The Religious Question in Mexico |^

A Reconstructive Policy in Mexico r "-a"

Manifest Destiny ^

What of Mexico ) ^.^

Speech of General Alvarado • t "-a"

Many Mexican Problems • ^

Charges Against the Diaz Administration |

Carranza ( "•^"

Stupenduous Issues '

Minister of the Catholic Cult )

Star of Hope for Mexico ( "-a"

Land Question in Mexico ^

Open Letter to the Editor of the Chicago Tribune, Chicago, 111. (

How We Robbed Mexico in 1848, by Robert H. Howe / 0.10

What the Mexican Conference Really Means '

The Economic Future of Mexico

We also mail any of these pamphlets upon receipt of 5c each.

Address all communications to

LATIN-AMERICAN NEWS ASSOCIATION
1400 Broadway, New York City

THE CONSTITUTIONALIST GOVERNMENT CONFRONT-
ED WITH THE SANITARY AND EDUCATIONAL
PROBLEMS OF MEXICO.

Mr. Chairman:

Members of the Academy and of the Pennsylvania Arbitra-
tion and Peace Society:

Ladies and Gentlemen : —

During the most acute and violent period of an Armed
Revolution — a veritable chaos in which it would seem that
the people, after destroying everything try to commit sui-
cide in a body — the news of isolated cases however hor-
rible they may be, cease to cause a deep impression, be-
fore the awfulness of the general catastrophe. As the
struggle reaches some form of organization by the group-
ing of men around the various nuclei representing the an-
tagonistic principles in action, individuals grow in import-
ance until the nucleus which best interpreted the ambitions
and wants of the people acquires absolute ascendancy.
Then, this group is unreasonably expected to strictly fulfill
all the obligations usually incumbent upon a Government
duly constituted. The sensation then provoked by the news
of isolated cases of misfortunes suffered by individuals,
because of their very rarity, cause greater consternation.

This is precisely what is occurring with the present Mexi-
can Government. Take any two dates from the beginning
of its organization. Compare dispassionately the relative
conditions of national life, and it will be necessary to admit
that the country is rapidly returning to normal political
and social conditions. It is also undeniable that the tem-
porary interruption of a line of communication, or the
attack on a train or village by rebels or outlaws, now
causes an exaggerated impression, people forgetting that
not so long ago, the greater part of the railway lines, or
the cities of the Republic were in the hands of said rebels
or outlaws, and that in the ver>^ territory dominated by
the Constitutionalist Government, trains and towos were
but too frequently assaulted.

But it is inconceivable to try to make the present Govern-
ment responsible for the transgressions of its predecessors.
The Revolution itself is a natural consequence of these
faults. Former Governments who knew not how to pre-
vent the Revolution, are responsible for the evils which
it may have brought in its train; and should the Nation
be saved, as it shall be, it will be due solely to the citizens
who have been willing to sacrifice themselves. In truth
it is only through personal sacrifices that it is possible
to construct a true fatherland.

The enemies of the new Regime — irreconcilable because
they will not accept the sacrifices imposed — are now burn-
ing their last cartridges, making the Constitutionalist
Government responsible for many of the calamities which
caused the Revolution, and which the Government, im-
pelled by the generous impulse which generated it, pur-
poses to remedy. Thvis do we explain the protests of the
discontented, and the monstrosity that said protests are
even more energetic and louder when they defend money
than when they defend life itself.

The theme of this night's address refers to one of these
calamities, a shameful legacy of the past. Inimical interests
are trying to attack the Constitutionalist Government on
this score, though it is the first Government in Mexico which
has tried to remedy this evil. Having been appointed by
the First Chief in charge of the Executive Power of Mex-
ico, Mr. Carranza, to make the study of the problem, I
would only have to summarize or copy some fragments
of the corresponding Report, in order to develop such
a theme.

"One of the most imperative obligations that civilization
imposes upon the State is to duly protect human life, to
permit the growth of society. It becomes necessary to
make known the precepts of private Hygiene and to put
them in practice, and to enforce the precepts of public
Hygiene. For the first, there is the school as an excellent
organ of propaganda. For the second, with more direct
bearing on healthfulnes§, there are principally special es-
tablishments to heal, to disinfect, to take prophylactic
measures. Then there are engineering works, laws and
regulations put in force by a technical personnel, or by
an administrative or police corps. It may therefore be
said without exaggerating, that there is a necessary rela-
tion of direct proportion between the sum of civilization
acquired by a country, and the degree of perfection attained
by its sanitary organization.**

The activities, in this respect, of General Diaz' Govern-
ment, during the thirty odd years of enforced peace and
of apparent material well-being, were devoted almost ex-

clusively to works to gratify the love of ostentation or
speculation. Seldom were they devoted to the true needs
of the country. There were erected magnificent build-
ings. To build the National Theatre and Capitol, both un-
finished, it was planned to spend sixty millions of pesos.
When it was a case of executing works of public utility,
their construction was made subservient to the illicit ends
pointed out. Thus for example the works of city improve-
ment, never finished, not even in the Capital, in spite of the
conditions of notorious unhealthfulness of some important
towns, were always begun with elegant and costly asphalt
pavements, which it became necessary to destroy and re-
place, whenever a water or drainage pipe had to be laid.
The work of education undertaken by the Government was
chiefly dedicated to erecting costly buildings for schools:
it is only in this way, therefore, that we can realize that
the proportion of persons knowing how to read and write
is barely 30% of the total population in the Republic.

The net result of what was done in these respects dur-
ing the long administration of General Diaz could not be
more disastrous. If we take the average of mortality for
the nine years from 1904 to 1912, the heyday of that ad-
ministration, we find that in Mexico City, where the great-
est sum of culture and material progress is to be found,
there is a rate of mortality of ^2.3 deaths for each one
thousand inhabitants. That is to say:

I. — It is nearly three times that prevailing in American
cities of similar density (16.1) ;

II. — Nearly two and one half times larger than the average
coefficient of mortality of comparable European cities
(17.53) and

III. — Greater than the coefficient or mortality of the Asiatic
and African cities of Madras and Cairo (39.51 and 40.15,
respectively) in spite of the fact that in the former, cholera
morbus is epidemic.

The annual average, corresponding to the same period,
of deaths in the City of Mexico due to avoidable disease,
if proper care for private and public Hygiene be taken —
and arraignment against the administration of General
Diaz — reaches more than 11,500 deaths. Now as the deaths
occasioned by the Revolution during the six years surely
do not reach 70,000, then we find that the Government of
General Diaz — so greatly eulogized — in the midst of peace
and prosperity, did not kill fewer people than a formidable
Revolution which set afire the whole Republic, and horri-
fied the whole world.

But the truth is that General Diaz' Government did not
recognize the formula of integral progress— the only one
which truly ennobles Humanity — and wasted its energies

in showy manifestations of a progress purely material and
ficticious, within the inevitable train of vice and corrup-
tion. The ostentatious pageant — the most shameless lie
with which it has ever been attempted to deceive the world
— which celebrated the anniversary of National Independ-
ence, took place exactly a few weeks prior to the Popular
Revolution of 1910, before whose onrush the Government
fell like a house of cards.

Let us now turn to the Constitutionalist Government.
In its banner it has written the resolve to better the condi-
tion of life of the people, socially and individually, and its
sincerity and energy may be seen not only in the words
but in deeds.

The Constitutionalist Government during its sojourn at
Vera Cruz at the close of 1914 and the beginning and
middle of 1915, while the Army reconquered the territory
of the Republic, at first almost wholly in the hands of the
enemy, in spite of being engaged in the most active cam-
paign in the annals of Mexican History, still found time
to take up the efficient political and administrative reor-
ganization of the country.

"Whoever may know something of our History, and may
view with impartiality the long and complicated process
of the formation of our nationality, from the pre-Cortes
period — through the troublous time of the Conquest, colo-
nial days under the viceroys, the wars of Independence,
the convulsions only calmed by the iron hand of Diaz, of
nearly one century of autonomous existence — until our own
time — will be bound to discover in the salient manifesta-
tions of the life of the national organism, the unequivocal
symptoms and stygmata of a serious pathological state,
brought about by two principal agents: the loathsome cor-
ruption of the upper classes, and the inconscience and
wretchedness of the lower."

"The iniquitous means used by Don Porfirio Diaz to
impose peace, during more than thirty years, not only an-
nulled all efforts tending to remedy the evils discussed, but
rather determined their greater intensity. As a matter of
fact, it satisfied the omnivorous appetites of his friends
and satellites; it crushed and caused the criminal disap-
pearance of whomever failed to render tribute or bow to
his will; it fostered cowards and sycophants, repressing
systematically and with an iron hand, every impulse of
manliness and truth. It placed the administration of jus-
tice at the unconditional disposal of the rich, paying not
the slightest heed to the lamentations of the poor. In a
word it increased the immorality and corruption of the
small and privileged ruling class and increased in conse-
quence the sufferings of the immense majprity, grovelling

6

in ignorance and hunger. Therefore, the thirty or more
years of praetorian peace, but served to deepen still further
the secular chasm of hatred and rancor separating the
two classes mentioned, and to provoke necessarily and
fatally the social convulsion, begun in 1910, and which has
shaken the whole country."

"The three aspects of the problem which I have presented
— the economic, intellectual and moral — coincide with the
purposes of education through schools, as ideally dreamed
of by thinkers, that is as 'institutions whose object is to
guide and control the formation of habits to realize the
highest social good.' But our schools, unfortunately, have
not yet acquired the necessary strength to assuage in an
appreciable degree, the horrible ambient immorality, or to
counterweigh its inevitable effects of social dissolution."

''The true problem of Mexico consists therefore in hygi-
enizing the population physically and morally, and in en-
deavoring to find through all means available, an improve-
ment in the precarious economical situation of our prole-
tariatr

"The part of the solution of the problem which corresponds
to the Department of Education or to the Municipalities, must
be realized, establishing and maintaining the greatest pos-
sible number of schools, to do which, their cost must be
reduced by means of a rational simplification of organiza-
tion and of school programs. This must be done without
losing sight of the fact that its preferential orientations
should be marked by: the character essentially technologi-
cal of the teaching, to co-operate with all the other organs
of the Government, in the work of economical improve-
ment of the masses, and through the diffusion of the ele-
mental principles of hygiene, as an efficient protection for
the race."

"And finally, as the medium does constitute an educa-
tional factor more powerful than the schools themselves,
the country must, before and above all, organize its pub-
lic administration upon a basis of absolute morality.'*

To come to a conclusion, restricting myself to the purpose
of this address, it will suffice to say: that when the Con-
stitutionalist Government ruled but an insignificant portion
of the country there w^ere yet sent to the principal centres
of culture of the United States several hundred teachers to
investigate and secure data to reform school matters in Mex-
ico. This was done at a time when dollars were of great
importance for the purchase of war material.

Subsequently, in spite of the countless obstacles which
seemed to obstruct every step of the Government, the num-
ber of schools has been greatly increased. It is now much

greater than it was before the Revolution: in some States
it has been doubled. Besides there have been effected im-
portant works of city improvement in Mexico, Saltillo,
Queretaro, Vera Cruz, etc., and the mouth of the Panuco
River is about to be dredged. It has been specified in the
respective contract that the soil taken out is to be used to
till in the marshy zone around Tampico, thus eliminating
the chief cause of this city's unhealthfulness.

In short, in order that the Government which has arisen
from the Constitutionalist Revolution may realize its pro-
gram of public betterment, which implies the physical and
moral hygienizing of Mexico, it is only necessary to give
it time. Only some magic art could transform in a moment
a group of human beings into an angel choir, or a piece
of land into a Paradise.

Philadelphia, Penn., November 10, 1916.

A. J. Pani.