IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
IS MEXICO
WORTH SAVING
By
GEORGE AGNEW CHAMBERLAIN
LATE CONSUL-GENBRAL,CITY OF MEXICO
INDIANAPOLIS
THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
COPYRIGHT 1920
THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
Printed in the United State* of America
PRESS OP
BRAUNWORTH ft CO.
BOOK MANUFACTURERS
BROOKLYN, N. Y.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I CARRANZA 13
II WHAT Is SHE 35
III GOVERNMENT BY BANDITRY ... 65
IV ROBBERY BY DECREE 102
V WHY ARMENIA 135
VI NEGOTIATION BY ULTIMATUM ONLY 171
VII THE ONLY WAY . 207
IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
CHAPTER I
CARRANZA
DATING from the Conquest, Mexico has been
the recognized kaleidoscope among the nations.
So rapidly are events habitually juggled through-
out her territories that no man, whether native
or foreign observer, has ever prophesied with
success as to the course she would take In any
crisis unless he prophesied disaster on the theory
that what has been, will be.
The average American for whom this book
is written has neither the time nor the inclina-
tion to study the thousand aspects of the shifting
prisms which make up the Mexican kaleidoscope,
but it will pay him now more than ever before
to grasp certain phases which stand out above
the confusion of the general panorama and
estimate for himself the force of the conclusions
which will be presented as embracing the only
13
14 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
satisfactory and permanent solution of a problem
that must inevitably continue to annoy us until
it is finally settled.
The first of these phases is the consideration
that however rapid the changes in the Mexican
situation, the ingredients are constant. If this
truth is seized and held, a long step will have
been taken toward simplification and under-
standing, because it will be seen that we need
not bother with isolated turmoil except as illus-
trating the study of what can be considered a
permanent condition of unrest.
Fasten your mind on this permanent condi-
tion of unrest. Whence does it arise? Why
does it repeat itself? Why has it been unpre-
cedentedly acute during the last seven years?
How have we contributed to its increase? Why
does it matter more to us to-day than it did
during the three-quarters of a century of anarchy
which preceded Diaz? Most important of all,
why are we being rapidly driven to a point where,
irrespective of our inclination, we must both
understand and take action on these questions?
CARRANZA 15
There are two ways of answering a question:
one is by unsupported statement, the other is by
conviction. We employ the former toward chil-^
dren, often with astonishing results. "What is
adoption?" asks the shorter catechism and
answers itself in the same breath, "An act of
God's free grace;" whereupon at least one child
was convinced that Godfrey's Grace had been up
to something. But if left to themselves children
invariably employ the method of conviction as
evidenced by the reply of a youngster to the ques-
tion, "What is thought?" "Thought is the
greatest think man ever thunk of; if it wasent
for thunk man wouldent be no greater nor a
horse."
From reading these two answers which would
you learn more about, adoption or thought?
There is no doubt in my own mind as to the
relative value of the two methods of assertion
and conviction; nevertheless I shall use them
both because the mere listing of questions with
accompanying didactic answers serves to fasten
attention on the matter to be discussed and holds
j 16 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
subsequent persuasion to certain very definite
ends.
Following this intention, whence does Mex-
ico's permanent condition of unrest arise? From
maladministration of public funds. Why does
it repeat itself? Because there has never been
party government with its swing of the pendulum
of power, but a succession of oligarchies. Why
has it been unprecedentedly acute during the
last seven years? Because it has exceeded the
bounds heretofore recognized as limiting the
oppressions of group governments to their own
nationals. How have we contributed to this
increase of an evil? By propounding the extra-
ordinary doctrine that no American has a right
to live abroad. Why does chaos in Mexico
matter more to us to-day than it did during the
three-quarters of a century preceding Diaz?
Because upon invitation of his government we
sent over forty thousand Americans and a bil-
lion and a half dollars into the country. Why
are we being rapidly driven to a point where we
must both understand and take action on these
CARRANZA 17
questions whether we want to or not? Because /
a nation can ignore a cur yapping at its heels but/
not a knife held at its back.
There you have the thesis of this argument.
It is not my purpose to take each of these asser-
tions in the order they have been set down and
prove them by an endless array of incidents
covering a hundred years of history. That
would be merely to invite you to confuse yourself
by gazing into the kaleidoscope. The most
I hope to do is to fasten your attention on a
series of illuminating high-lights so that at the
end you can say: "These deductions are well
founded; the conclusions appeal to reason; the
solution of the problem is adequate."
When one is inviting a busy man to solve
a troublesome equation, the very first step is
to persuade him that its solution is urgent, that
it is important to him individually. Average
men are slow to perform any given action on the
ground that it will save the world, but they are
quick in decision if it is a matter of saving five
cents. The unthinking cynic is apt to cry,
18 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
"Human nature!" in the face of this truth, and
he is dead wrong. The reason average man is
slow to save the world and quick to save a nickel
is that when dreamtime is over he can't per-
suade himself that a single action will save the
world but he can believe that it may save five
cents. Here you have the difference between a
mirage and a carfare, between altruism running
wild and common sense plodding along on the job.
Before the writer went to Mexico he was
an advocate of a league to enforce peace. Two
years in that country reversed his system of
thought. What had happened? Fancy had been
wrecked on fact. He knew from the inside that
during years we had held a tacit mandatory from
Great Britain and France over Mexico. In its
exercise we had successively applied the following
shibboleths of international altruism: watchful
waiting, hands off, self-determination, no force
against a weaker nation, benevolence and no
protection to nationals abroad.
He was one of the inactive agents in the
official trying out of every one of these slogans of
CARRANZA 19
peace at any price and he can conscientiously
take his oath before man and God that in every
case these doctrines have been the source of
misery without benefit not only to those of
our own flesh and blood who innocently went
abroad in the faith of an established tradition of
protection but to the Mexicans themselves.
Pricked by the goad of facts he was forced to
realize against his natural inclination and personal
interests that you cannot reach a millennium by
hanging in air a roof of peace unsupported by
the foundations and props of elementary justice.
It is possible that you agree with that asser-
tion but fail to see what individual interest you
have in reviewing the remarkable career of Car-
ranza, made possible only by the no less remark-
able stand taken by President Wilson and ending
In one of the great futilities of history. If fate
had not brought these two extraordinary indi-
vidualities into juxtaposition, that is, if the
greatest illusionist in our own history had not
synchronized with the greatest opportunist Mex-
ico has produced, we would not be faced to-day
20 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
with an astonishing dilemma. In other words,
if altruism had met altruism no damage would
have been done; but with our own pilot throwing
overboard the working gear of the ship of state,
masts, stays and anchor, everything but the
hull itself, and the other pilot salvaging the
lot with both hands, it is time we awoke to the
fact that we have showered on the Mexicans
unwarranted concessions which cannot be assim-
ilated by them without causing national indiges-
tion, and which we must devise some means of
rescinding for the benefit of the latest Mexican
Republic no less than for our own.
Just what was the working gear President
Wilson abandoned? When he declared publicly
for watchful waiting, he put public interest in
outrages across the border to sleep; when he
announced the doctrine of hands off, he sapped
the strength from diplomatic protest; when he
came out for self-determination, he blinded him-
self and the world to the fact that Mexico has
had self-determination for a hundred years;
when he proclaimed benevolence to Mexico and
CARRANZA 21
no protection to nationals abroad, he made all
ultimatums absurd; when he declared for no
force against a weaker nation, he abandoned the
anchor of an appeal to arms, the basis and founda-
tion without which all negotiation, friendly or
unfriendly, is simply non-existent
For the course of this chapter, never mind
whether you think he was right or wrong but
admit that since the fall of Huerta, President
Wilson has been an attitude., in his relations to
Mexico, never a force. This brings us into
**-* .^
position for a study of Carranza, a man who in the
six years preceding his tragic death showed a
greater individual development than any per-
sonality in America since Lincoln. That his
growth was inverted and found expression not
in the liberation but in the oppression of a people
does not diminish his significance; it merely
stamps it with a different hall-mark.
Three years ago Carranza was balanced above
a quaking military bog; twelve months later
he was a power with the apparent stability of
a rock. What was the answer? He had hit upon
22 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
a formula. He had discovered that by taking
one part sophistry, two parts blood money, and
three parts hatred of the United States he could
coagulate the quagmire under him into temporary
concrete. He did it and from that emplacement
systematically slapped us with an immunity
which astonished himself, his associates, and
the world at large. Opportune turns of the
wheel of fortune and the effective moral aid of the
President of the United States placed him at the
head of a nominal Mexican government so inse-
cure in every element which tends toward stability
among normal peoples that his position appeared
absolutely untenable. Before him stretched a
rough road strewn with the rocks of growing
deficits, internal disorders, clamoring claims, and
hedged by the endless byways of reconstruction.
Behind him was a record of prowess by the grace
of luck and, lurking in the shadow, the enigmat-
ically smiling faces of half a dozen generals, any
one of whom could have pushed the Supreme Chief
off his rickety pedestal by the raising of a little
finger. What saved him for a meteoric rise and an
CARRANZA 23
inevitable crash? His difficulties and the echoing
emptiness of the national larder. He was heir to
a heritage which no one envied.
The months of grace granted him by that
single condition proved a forcing house for ele-
ments of greatness in Carranza, wholly unsus-
pected by his quiescent rivals or the public at
large. He had no ardent admirers even among
his own people. He was absolutely devoid of the
magnetism of a popular leader, he was unsup-
ported by any spectacular achievement, insecure
in his hold on imaginations easily fired by elo-
quence. He lacked, in comparison with certain
of his forerunners, the loud-mouthed echoing
of grandiloquent ideals from a host of hungry
satellites. When every one expected him to fall
as a matter of course he stood because none had a
motive for hastening the empty debacle, and as
a result he gained time.
To none of his predecessors had time brought
anything but disaster, for Mexico is the home
of the coup d'etat, of fame born overnight,
and of man in breathless and often ridiculous pur-
24 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
suit of the event. But Carranza seemed different.
He had three virtues highly praised among
mortals, but seldom exercised because their
power is so slow in accumulation: silence, pa-
tience, immobility. [ Behind that triple screen
he sat like some hibernating insect and projected /
his antennae, Luis Cabrera, Alberto Pani, Rafael
Nieto, all civilians, into the surrounding atmos- )
phere, feeling out the calm before the storrrio
At that time, over three years ago, he was at a
momentous parting of the ways, but how far he
sensed the fact will never be known, for such words
as come from the mouth of an established oracle
never fit the small beginnings of power. Never-
theless he had a choice more distinctly defined
than any granted his many prototypes. Cir-
cumstances were blocked out for him in unusu-
ally clear masses. The World War was at its
height and absorbed the attention of the American
people and government. From the same source,
and in the face of a wrecked banking system, had
sprung a lusty little trade boom which sufficed
to feed the exchequer hand to mouth and day by
CARRANZA 25
day. Finally, there was an almost totally fresh
deal in resident American officials from the Ambas-
sador down, men picked for their experience
in Latin affairs, unbiased by the trying events
which had scarred their predecessors, and trained
in a school of effective compromise, friendly by
profession.
Carranza had the choice of two roads. He
could accept Fletcher's Embassy and the revi-
talizing of our consular establishment throughout
Mexico, in the spirit evidenced by the action of
the United States in sending a full quota of
officers, and by so doing lift his country out of a
harassing maze of misunderstanding to a pinnacle
of prosperity never before attained. Or he could
turn a cold eye on the hand of friendship and
build an insecure edifice of his own on the rubble of
internal greed, jealousies and pride.
The horns of this dilemma were not equal.
The road to international friendship was open
as far as the eye could see, but there was a gamble
at its end. Carranza could hang a policy of
rapprochement on the peg of our passive resistance
26 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
to Huerta and consequent aid to himself, open up
genuine negotiations for a settlement of all
outstanding differences, assume a position of
benevolent neutrality toward the World War,
reap the full benefits for his country of a tre-
mendous rush in trade, borrow the millions he
needed for a funding of every foreign obligation,
revivify industry, and substitute for the tradi-
tional enrichment of the few by graft a wave of
almost universal prosperity. He could have done
all this. But he could not estimate his chances of
holding the replenished resources of the nation
against the enigmatically smiling military com-
manders behind his back once his success should
have aroused their cupidity. That was the
gamble with honor he refused to face, and for
what an alternative!
He turned into the road of opportunism, not
suddenly, nor with a blare of trumpets, but with
a shrewd and measured calculation. If an epi-
gram can stamp a hall-mark on any career, it
may be said of Carranza that he was established
by the conditions that threatened him. Without
CARRANZA 27
power there is no danger. The military were
dangerous to him; he knew it, everybody knew
it, it was the talk of the streets. He was no sol-
dier. He could not attain to a legitimate share
in that power, but by taking thought for a month
of morrows he could bend temporarily the whole
of it to his own uses.
How did he do it? By looking for the danger
behind the danger. What gave strength to the
military? Not honesty, nor patriotism, nor
enforcement of order, but patronage, hypocrisy
in the face of unsettled conditions, and last, but
by no means least, the immemorial right among
the family of Mexican generals of every genera-
tion to point to the Colossus of the North, and
yell "Treason!" at any reasonable arrangement
with the United States. Here was his formula
graft, banditry and international insult in combi-
nation; and apparently no gamble at the end of
the road.
By selling himself body and soul to the mili-
tary through emptying into its pockets sixty per
cent, of the national revenue, it became his ally
28 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
at least for as long as the exchequer could stand
the strain. Hand in hand with that result went
one of far-reaching consequences. Mexico was
not at war. She was not even threatened with
war. Why, then, spend almost two-thirds of
her total resources in maintaining an army?
The answer was, bandits, internal disorders.
While they lasted the army had a reason for
existence. The fact that these disorders existed
up to the day of the disaffection of Obregon and
his followers, even at the doors of the capital,
carries on its face the proof that the army realized
from the first the necessity for keeping intact, as
long as it was profitable, the right-angled triangle
with lawlessness for its base, the military as the
upright and Carranza in the role of chestnut
snatcher as the buttressing hypotenuse.
If the results of Carranza's taking the wrong
turn had been limited to a petty conspiracy for
the bleeding of his own country, we could shrug our
shoulders and pass on as we have for a century
past, but the fatality about any crossroads is that
it implies an increasing divergence. If one of
CARRANZA 29
those two paths led to mutual benefit for the
United States and Mexico, the other led neces-
sarily to estrangement. If one meant pacifica-
tion, security for both labor and capital, inter-
national honor and reconstruction, the other
meant internecine warfare, abandoned fields,
rusting industries, the palm of bad faith among
nations, penury and despair to all save the mili-
tary clique and its satellites. The greatness of
Carranza was in a measure forced upon him.
Nothing short of President Wilson's reiterated
assurances that whatever Mexico's course, he
would remain passive, could have lured Carranza
to follow the road to power at so breakneck a pace;
but once he awoke to find his feet set on that
highway he developed extraordinary attributes
of vision, understanding and constant action.
What I mean by that is that he did not consciously
choose the goal of estrangement from the United
States but having had it handed to him on a
platter, garnished with racial prejudice in his
own country and with supine acquiesence in
ours, he saw his chance. He not only accepted
30 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
the goal; with his eyes wide open he decided that
since he had to travel that road he would miss no
single opportunity of aggrandisement for himself
and incidentally for Mexico.
From that day a remarkable contest arose
between the presidents of the two countries.
One started throwing away all he possessed and
the other set out to grab all he could get. It
is easier to drop things than it is to pick them up,
consequently the honors of this herculean battle
went to Carranza, for we let go no single hard-
earned item of precedent, prestige or power
which he failed to seize before it hit the ground
and turn to his own uses.
If it were possible to put personalities out
of mind and study these two individuals as
mighty exponents of diametrically opposed ideas,
certain truths would stand out above the plane
of controversy and reestablish common sense as
the proper basis for comity between nations.
Wilson stood for internationalism in its most
altruistic interpretation? Carranza for nationalism
in its most selfish application. Wilson buried
CARRANZA 31
his head not in sand but in the clouds of chimerical
aspirations, abstract considerations and nebular
intentions. In other words, he perched on a
weather-vane and never knew from one moment
to another which way he was headed. Carranza
kept his eye peeled, his feet on Mother Earth,
and followed the ball morning, noon and night.
Wilson was passive; Carranza active.
We need not go here into the natural laws
which govern the development of bodies in action
and inaction beyond noting that passivism
implies voluntary atrophy; the pacifist is entirely
logical only when he is dead. The activist, how-
ever, thrives on the submission of others; he grows
by acquisition. By no other formula can we
account for the astonishing evolution of Carranza
during the last three years of his disastrous reign.
He gorged himself on the inanition of Wilson. As
a result, as far as our relations with Mexico at
the present day are concerned, our interests can
best be pictured as in the position of a large frog
swallowed whole by a small snake.
If these two presidential gladiators had
32 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
lined up behind their personal property only
and one had said, "See if you can take faster than
I can throw away,'* and the other had replied,
"See if you can throw away faster than I can
take," the battle might have gone on for seven
years without arousing anything beyond good-
natured laughter; but unfortunately what our
President threw overboard so recklessly was the
commerce of the United States, the traditions of
every-day good faith of the American people,
the safety of our nationals wherever they may wish
to wander, the conception of justice first as the
basis of international dealing and incidentally
the respect of the Mexicans, in short, almost
the entire diplomatic heritage of the nation.
Could we balance against this loss any genuine
benefit to Mexico we might take vicarious
satisfaction in the sacrifice, but seven years of
pusillanimity on our part disguised under the
term of benevolence produced no happy nation
south of the border. On the contrary, since the
success of the Obregon revolution it has become
common talk throughout Mexico that the stand
CARRANZA 33
taken by Wilson, amounting to tacit approval of
all Carranza's activities, was the preponderant
source in Mexico of internal strife and disorder.
Carranza alone emerged from the wreckage with
added stature.
Because we were easy to feed upon he grew
to proportions which otherwise he would never
have attained. He had the shrewdness to see
that self-imposed weakness smells the same as
weakness under any other name, he appreciated
the fact that any policy is supreme over no policy.
He chose a single road, traveled along it doggedly
and left Wilson on his weather-vane four years be-
hind history. Carranza, the individual, has been
eliminated, but the unwarranted concessions which
we lavished upon him do not pass with his down-
fall; they have stood for seven years and under the
name of precedents they are bound to prove
stumbling blocks in the path of any sane inter-
national readjustment.
By reason not so much of his crown of martyr-
dom but because he was steadfast to the end in
flaunting the crushing power involved in the aloof-
34 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
ness of the United States, Carranza's position in
history is assured. He was the opportunist who
never missed a chance, not even in death. He
stands as a concrete fact against a background of
illusions. He died the undefeated champion of
divorce at any price between Latin America and
the United States, and made us and his own people
unwilling heirs to years of avoidable unrest. What
strength he bequeaths to his country is the
memory of pledges broken, traditions uprooted,
and international obligations repudiated, all with
impunity. By that legacy alone, however, he
quit the game of life as he saw fit to play it a
winner.
CHAPTER II
WHAT IS SHE
Do YOU know Mexico? Have you ever
traversed her plains or crossed the superb ranges
of her mountains? She is the woman par excel-
lence among nations, a naturally fruitful vine,
mistress of more varieties and changing moods
than any other equal territory on the face of the
earth. Her feet are dipped in tepid waters, her
skirts trail the lush riches of the tropics, she is
girdled with fertile though abandoned valleys,
bedecked with gold, silver and irrepressible
harvests, and crowned with a diadem of snow-
capped peaks. She is forever in travail and,
rain or shine, troubled or untroubled, presents
to the world's commerce men-children full-
grownbullion, by the carload; hemp, by the
million bales; oil, beyond the capacity of any
known method of transportation.
Just at this point, and to stem the cupidity
that may arise from such a picture in the minds of
35
36 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
those who look upon any territorial maiden in
distress as fair prey, let me say that nothing in
this argument of a great issue should be con-
strued as advocating the annexation by conquest
of all or part of Mexico under any conceivable
eventuality. We must do something; the time
is upon us when we have it in our power to do
something tremendously constructive, but to
square that something with our own ideals and
the demands of humanity we require more than
a moment of thought or an outburst of chauvin-
ism. We need to balance the present against the
past, review the record of affront and injury,
and then turn our minds to the crystallizing of
vague desires for a clean-up, any clean-up, into
a definite and concise program' aimed at a single
goal, which, once reached, will insure international
peace and internal tranquillity not for a day, a
year, or even a dictator's lifetime, but for such a
period as blesses only those monuments of human
endeavor which are built in wisdom on the lasting
foundations of elementary justice, genuine equal-
ity and actual freedom.
WHAT IS SHE 37
Why not state that goal here and now in a
paragraph, and be done with it? Because no
man can judge a penalty without considering
the crime. Because we are not ready for im-
mediate absorption of a conclusion based on frag-
mentary evidence. Because, in spite of the flood of
exposures of outrages perpetrated in Mexico and
let loose by our daily press, the public still knows
nothing of their basic causes.
When an American attempts to visualize
Mexico in her relation to the United States,
what does he see? A yapping terrier fighting
the tail of a snoring St. Bernard? A curious mon-
key hammering with a rock on the percussion
cap of an unexploded shell? A teasing boy
experimenting on how far he can go without
colliding with a slipper? If these conceptions,
all tolerant and unfortunately wide-spread, were
near the truth, we might be justified in balancing
the ills of continued indifference, watchful wait-
ing, and subterfuge against the burdens and the
annoyance, to a war-weary world, of decisive
action.
38 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
But Mexico to-day, whatever she may have
been in the past, is more than a yapping cur,
a teasing boy, or a curious monkey, and it is
high time that the man in the street should
measure her potential viciousness, revise his
misconception, and read the writing on the wall
of a hundred years of history and four years of
Carranza. Mexico has a continuing policy not
invented but innate, sucked in with mother's
milk. Among devotees of a certain pastime it
can be described as the art of passing the buck;
in more dignified language, she blinds us from her
pepper-box of high-sounding words and behind
that screen resorts with astonishing success and
redundancy to actions treacherous to our welfare
and disastrous to her own.
If we do not adopt an active policy having a
definite aim and stick to it, she will repeat this
procedure sooner or later, whoever happens to be
in temporary possession of her coffers. 'You and I
have a legitimate lien on these coffers by right of
purchase and it will repay you to learn why and
how as well as its extent.
WHAT IS SHE 39
Just what percentage of a hundred millions
of us is interested in trade or in banking or in
manufacture for export or in the purchase of
raw materials for home consumption or in the
every-day marketing of goods or in commerce
in the big sense of world-crop movements? Do
you belong under that list? If so forget the
emotionalism and the interested propaganda that
have made the Mexican question a bore to the
practical mind and wake up to the fact that you
are sitting in on a big deal, that you have been
in it a long, long time and that before you know it
somebody will poke you in the ribs and call on
you to decide in a hurry whether you are going
to defend your margin.
A man's actions are too often like seeds from
an unreliable seed-house. He plants them, specu-
lates knowingly on the crop he thinks he is sowing
and then wakes up to the morning after. Where
he expected a forest he reaps corn or tares and to
his amazement what he thought was a frijole
turns out to have been an acorn. This happened to
Carranza. In propitiating the military with
40 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
over half the sugar in the national barrel he did
not reckon on the creation of a mastering brute
through fattening the belly of banditry; in
sticking pins into the softest portion of the United
States while its face was turned inexorably
toward Europe he did not foresee a feverish out-
burst of race hatred so violent that it was bound
to burn itself out. Least of all did he imagine that
from the combination of these two lucky-strike
departures he was to balloon into the champion of
all Latin America against the Gringo.
What is Mexico? Is she the barren rampart
of rock that frowns from the west on the Gulf
of California or the alkali and cactus desert that
baffled Pershing.or is she potentially the richest
country of her size in the wide world, and no
mean size at that? Here are the facts. From
the snow-capped breasts of Popocatapetl and
IxtaccihuatI, hanging seventeen thousand feet in
air, she radiates through frigid, temperate and
tropic zones. She can and does play the whole
octave of agricultural production from winter
wheat to sorghum, sorghum to sugar cane, sugar
WHAT IS SHE 41
cane to coffee, coffee to cotton, cotton to chicle,
and chicle to the guayule of desert country and the
henequen of torrid sands.
Since the fencing of our own West and up to
the fall of Diaz her plains swarmed with such
herds as are only a memory to cattlemen of the
defunct lariat school. Twelve years ago a single
proprietor branded ninety thousand calves and
had to let the rest enter the maverick class. Where
are these cattle to-day? Stolen, scattered and shot
down by the thousand for the sake of the hides
alone, some by out and out bandits but a far
greater number by Constitutionalist predatory
troops. The cattle are gone but the plains still
stretch to the horizon.
It may be that you are not interested in the
farm and range products, the strictly internal
wealth of Mexico. Think a minute. You know
our own country. Where is its spinal column,
the backbone of the nation, if not in field and
farm? He who sells, buys. Now, how many
motor-cars, tractors, silos, reapers, sewing ma-
chines, lightning rods, spools of cotton, bolts of
42 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
cloth and boxes of bonbons do you think the
backbone of the United States would buy if all
its railways but one were subject to almost daily
wrecks by dynamite, if half of its states were
overrun by outlaws and if over the other half
the national army were turned loose to bleed
graft from every producer?
Such was the unhappy condition of Mexico under
Carranza; yet in the face of it she did business
with us in 1918 to the tune of $245,613,991 as
against a total trade with the world at large of
$80,496,365 for the last six months of 1908 when
she was still looked upon as a nation rather than
as a seething cauldron of oppressors and oppressed.
If she can reach that figure with a broken back-
bone what might she not attain to under a stable
and just government which, not in words but in
actual practise, should permit the peon to plant
with some hope of reaping his crop and not the
whirlwind, refugee property holders to return to
their ranches, industries to resume and merchants
to import with a reasonable chance of getting the
goods bought for cash in full with their orders?
WHAT IS SHE 43
But when it comes to measuring the size of
the commercial pot at stake, Mexico's internal
wealth is only half the story. Owing to the in-
vasion of foreign blood, money and energy which
took place during the last quarter of the nine-
teenth century she experienced a resurrection
of which the average American is surprisingly
ignorant Here is a country that lies cheek by
jowl with ours along a border of eighteen hundred
and ten miles, yet how many of us know that in
spite of insurrection and banditry on the one hand
and a government whose motto was the destruc-
tion of property values on the other, she is to-day
a large factor in half a dozen crops and products
the movements of which shake the markets of
the world?
What are these sources of wealth? Does the
list touch you? Crude oil, silver, gold, hemp,
chicle the foundation of chewing gum and cof-
fee. Until the wholesale destruction of plantations
by bandits and of industries by Carranza's govern-
ment she was an exporter of rubber, sugar and
tobacco. During the war she became our main-
44 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
stay in the supply of certain basic ores. In 1919
she exported 74,000,000 barrels of crude oil
valued at over $90,000,000; in 1911, before the
total production of gold was absorbed for internal
uses, her export of that commodity exceeded
$29,000,000; in 1919 she produced 1948 metric
tons of silver bullion valued at over $80,000,000.
The last available figures give her an average
annual export of coffee of over 18,000 tons.
This is not a statistical chapter. It is written
for the man in a hurry looking for a comprehen-
sive bird's-eye view upon which he can base a
just and practical working estimate of the facts
in the case. How better sum up for him a con-
crete conclusion than by pointing out that with
Mexico in turmoil, with all but one of her railways
subject to frequent raids, with her entire banking
system in suspension, with a lack of the common
guarantees of life to any American caught ten
miles from any town, with import and export
taxes tripled and quadrupled, with an oligarchi-
cal government sucking graft from every peon,
with this Mexico, rich even in her poverty* we
WHAT IS SHE 45
did a business of $277,000,000 in 1919 as against
$141,000,000 in 1914.
Compare those figures with her total trade of
$80,496,365 for the last six months of 1908, not
with the United States but with the world,
remember that this progress was made in the face
of a governmental destructive policy which wiped
out ninety per cent, of her industries, invalidated
life-long titles and undermined the good will of
every civilized nation with which she was in com-
mercial contact and give due credit to her as-
tounding vitality and irrepressible natural wealth.
Now, what is our legitimate stake in this
neighboring country and how have we protected
it? The best estimates place the figure at a
billion and a half dollars, more American money
than is invested industrially in any other country,
more than was so invested by Americans fifteen
years ago in all other foreign countries put to-
gether! How have we defended it? Ever since
President Wilson applied the invidious tag of Big
Interests against the fifty thousand Americans
who were employed throughout Mexico ten years
46 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
ago on railways, farms and ranches, in mines,
smelters, foundries, breweries and oil-fields, we
have defended it not at all.
If you are an industrial, a farmer or small
land-owner, reflect that the apathy which swept
through the United States on account of the
loosing of that epithet has displaced none of the
big mining or oil companies as yet, but it threw
out of their jobs and off their hard-earned land
forty thousand industrials, farmers and small
land-owners of your own flesh and blood and bids
fair to establish a doctrine contrary to all our
previous tradition, the doctrine that an American
has a right to live only at home.
Reflect further on the following lime-light
string of incidents. A year ago I was in a small
New York up-state city and was introduced in
the lobby of its bank as fresh from Mexico. In-
side half an hour a group of eight investors in
Mexico had gathered for a post-mortem. Two
weeks later I was in a sleepy South Jersey city
where a doctor spoke reminiscently of when he
refused a quarter of a million for his share in a
WHAT IS SHE 47
Mexican mine. He is still holding the share and
the bag. "But," he said, "I'm not the only one.
There are half a dozen more in this town that
remember Mexico." Finally, the other day I
was relating the above to some guests in New York
when the maid in attendance murmured, "My
husband had two rubber plantations in Mexico."
What does this indicate? It shows that it is
not only the West and the Southwest of the United
States that have a stake in Mexico; it shows that
Americans of humble station as well as large
investors have paid a heavy price, in many cases
all they possessed, because the President forced
an abandonment of their rights by insisting that
watchful waiting was a policy and not a will-o'-
the-wisp luring us through inaction into a mire.
With his eyes shut tight against facts, he seized
upon the expedient of shouting Big Interests! with
the intention or at least the result of diverting
the public from a condition which it was begin-
ning to see was outrageous. Incidentally the sugar-
pill which he handed this country to quiet its
well-founded solicitude for the welfare of our
48 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
largest and most productive foreign colony has
induced the murder of more Americans in ten
years than had been murdered abroad in the
previous century, and the proportion of capitalist
victims to every-day, common-garden, You-and-
I people has been as one to a hundred. Think it
out.
But let us take up the gage. There is some-
thing to be said for big interests. I shall go further
than that. I will assert that even oil interests
have rights and to make you believe it let us
connect them in a single paragraph with the money
in your own pocket if you possess a Rolls-Royce or
a flivver or work in a factory or travel by sea or
ship goods or depend on a jitney to get to your job
or if you contribute to the support of the United
States Navy.
The Mexican fields now supply over ninety per
cent, of all the fuel oil used on our Atlantic and
Gulf coasts both for bunkering ships and industrial
purposes, namely, 60,000,000 barrels per annum,
almost double the amount that came from the
same source in 1918. What did you pay a ton
WHAT IS SHE 49
for the coal in your cellar? What did your
town's industries pay for their winter stock?
Whatever the price it will go higher for every
barrel of Mexican oil that is prevented from
reaching our shores. Do you buy gasoline for
flivver, pump, factory or cleaning gloves? The
60,000,000 barrels of fuel oil are the residuum from
300,000,000 gallons of gasoline which went into
the regular trade of this country and are helping
to move our 6,000,000 pleasure cars, lorries and
delivery wagons to say nothing of the tractors and
producing agents of town and field.
I hold no brief for any special interest and can
prove it. I owe no favors, least of all to the oil
interests involved in Mexico. We are not con-
cerned here with whether those interests have
bungled in questions of policy or not, but we are
deeply concerned in the facts of a condition which
among other ills threatens the very existence of
our merchant marine.
What are these facts? In the first place the
vast holdings of the twenty-odd operating Ameri-
can companies in Mexico were not secured by
50 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
grants or concessions as the President implied
in his speeches through ignorance or malice;
they were bought and paid for in the open
market just as you bought your winter hat or an
overcoat if you had the price. They were secured
not only by the usual legal titles to land but by a
clause in the mining laws under the constitution
of 1857 which stated specifically that petroleum
and its by-products were free of the mining law
and subject to transfer with the soil.
Now what follows is so extraordinary that it is
difficult to believe. The present Mexican govern-
ment adopted in 1917 a new constitution which
nationalized the subsoil; in other words it de-|
clared that land titles no longer carried the
right to the oil under the surface. No just man
can object to that stand; it embraces a progres-
sive principle which is already widely recognized.
Incidentally the same constitution of 1917 carried
assurances stating that none of its provisions was
to be construed as retroactive.
So far, so good. Here follows the incredible.
By a series of decrees, unconfirmed by any Mexi-
WHAT IS SHE 51
can Congress, Carranza declared the clauses
affecting oil in the new constitution to be retroac- ,
tive. This colossal imposition was made possible \
only by President Wilson's repeated assertion that
no matter what Mexico had done, or might do,
this country would never again resort to force.
Already it has been publicly announced that
the Obregon government offers to recede from this
untenable position, but we should be wary of
accepting bare justice as though it were a great
concession. Diplomatically, we should fight tooth
and nail against even the appearance of trading to
get back the inalienable rights jettisoned by Mr.
Wilson. Bare justice is never a concession in any
litigation; it is merely the preliminary to negotia-
tion.
If the oil companies had complied even under
protest with the law of Mexico as Carranza
individually interpreted it, any arbiter would be
justified in holding that they had forfeited their
existing rights as well as the right of recourse to
Mexican or international courts. Consequently
these companies, with a few exceptions, stood pat,
52 IS MEXICO_WORTH SAVING
refused point-blank to step into the trap laid for
them and have been feeding half the lawyers in
Mexico City in attempts to secure justice before
courts notoriously corrupt. Of course, they
supplemented that vain effort by appeals to our
State Department which day by day laboriously
ground out notes destined to no nobler effect or
fate than to become the laughing-stock of future
generations.
Meanwhile Carranza steadily proceeded along
the line of no resistance indicated to him by our
plan of watchful waiting. Beginning with Novem-
ber 9th, 1919, armed Federal forces closed down
eighty per cent, of all new wells drilling in Mexico.
Add to that the fact that a surprisingly large num-
ber of the big wells in Mexico went out of produc-
tion last year through exhaustion and salt-water
flooding and you will realize in part why our Navy,
Shipping Board and every individual consumer of
crude oil and gasoline are so pressed to-day for a
minimum working supply of fuel.
By the middle of January of this year the oil
companies were brought to bay and played their
WHAT IS SHE 53
last card. Their Producers 'Association abandoned
the paralyzed machinery of the State Department
and addressed a telegram direct to the President
of Mexico pointing out the disastrous economic
consequences to the Mexican government should
oil production come to an absolute standstill.
It happened that at that time the millions of
dollars paid in export taxes on oil formed the mar-
gin of safety in the Mexican national budget, but
the fact that Carranza conceded the granting of
strictly temporary drilling permits, in a six-hun-
dred-word cablegram published in full by the press,
is remarkable for the manner in which that cable-
gram was addressed rather than for its welcome
content.
For six months our State Department had been
sweating notes on this very question of drilling
permits without result. Picture for yourself the
purely personal satisfaction of Carranza in putting
one more of many over on that dignified division
of our government by addressing his concession,
whatever the underlying home conditions which
made him grant it, not to Mr. Lansing, but to
54 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
"The Huasteca Petroleum Co., The Texas Co. of
Mexico, The Southern Oil & Transportation Co.,
The Scottish-Mexican Oil Co., Ltd., and othei
signers, New York."
Enough has been said to illustrate the enor-
mous commercial potentialities of Mexico; enough
has been implied to show that our attitude of
"let her slide" toward that country has bolstered
up a regime of disorder and produced three pre-
sumably unexpected results. It has stifled the
prosperity of the mass of Mexicans, it has under-
mined our moral and physical standing in the
country by destroying every vestige of respect for
American life and American property, and most of
all by the peculiar irony that keeps the sissy at
school continually in hot water it has led us stead-
ily not toward peace but toward war.
Commercially,Mexicohasscarcelybeenscratched.
What about her finances? If you have any opin-
ion at all on the matter you probably think they
are beyond mending because she has passed
interest on her national obligations to the tune of
forty-eight and a half million dollars since 1914.
WHAT IS SHE 55
That is a wrong impression. The financial posi-
tion of Mexico to-day is stronger than that of the
vast majority of even the great nations. Her
annual revenue at the close of Diaz' administra-
tion according to a publication of the Pan-Amer-
ican Union was under $55,000,000 which was
sufficient to leave a surplus over expenditure.
Carranza in his message to Congress last Septem-
ber estimated the revenue for 1919 at $81,000,000
and for 1920 at $83,500,000. The trouble with
her revenues during her recent administration was
not their size but the manner in which they were
applied; sixty per cent, to a useless army, not five
per cent, to construction.
Her total external debt to-day plus passed
interest is $222,023,621. Add to that a total in-
terior debt of $84,048,459, a guaranteed debt on
paper issues of $41,472,690, money and interest
owed on railways in the sum of $421,319,878 and
you will get a total national obligation exclusive of
claims of only $768,864,648, a mere bagatelle in
the face of her resources. Why is the figure so
small? Because she could not borrow and she
56 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
was not able to borrow because the Carranza re-
gime was making ducks and drakes of her national
honor and scraps of paper of all her promises to
pay. Thus out of evil comes a single gleam of
good.
Near the start of this chapter reference was
made to Mexico's peculiar skill in blinding us
from her pepper-box of fine words and in matters
of trade and commercial treaties she has one
bogey which never fails in its mission of scaring
us away from common-sense decisions. Its name
is sensitiveness, alias national pride.
An American statesman retiring without the
honors of war from a several weeks' bout with a
Mexican commission sat and ruminated for a long
while; then he delivered himself of this saying
which should become a classic in our annals.
"You can't pin a Mexican to facts; when you try it
he waves national pride in your face and uses his
country's sensitiveness just the way a pole-cat
protects himself."
Vulgar? Perhaps; but every one of our secre-
taries of state and ambassadors to Mexico should
WHAT IS SHE 57
memorize it and paste it in his hat lest he forget,
because it is packed with Yankee penetration,
oozes psychology and blazes the way to a new
philosophy. Incidentally it calls the bluff that
has so impressed our entire string of official and
unofficial trade publications that you can scarcely
pick one of them up without running across col-
umns telling us that we must pat all Latins on the
back, speak soft and be as friendly as a hungry
cat to get their trade.
Do not believe it. Use your own head. ' If
merchant No. 1 on account of racial likes or dis*
likes pays two cents cash on a bolt of muslin more
than merchant No. 2 he is on the road to a vacancy
in Bradstreet's and the sooner you drop him the
better. Ninety-nine per cent, of the merchants I
have known are Number Twos; the other one per
cent, were fine old fellows but they are dead.
Pleasant salesmen, yesl But pleasant nationalism
on our part is despised throughout the length and
breadth of Latin America. What sells goods is the
price at which they are offered; what determines
the price to-day more than any other factor is
58 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
transportation. Nothing but our own amazing
lassitude in regard to Mexico could have robbed
us of the full benefits of easy access to her markets.
This leads us straight to the exceptional com-
mand of her commerce which we held at the close
of the war and wastefully threw into the discard.
In May of 1917 our consular establishment in
Mexico City consisted of a vice-consul, a clerk and
a stenographer housed in a ramshackle building;
in May of 1918 it occupied the Limantour Palace
at the junction of the five great avenues of the
city and its personnel comprised a consul-general,
five vice-consuls and six stenographers besides
clerks and messengers.
What was this large force doing? Besides other
special business arising from the war it was enforc-
ing in conjunction with the Embassy and in close
cooperation with every other American consular
officer in Mexico the Enemy Trading Act. That
simple statement has to be enlarged to be under-
stood. It means that under black-list rules no
single shipment entered or left the country with-
out the filing of exhaustive data concerning ship-
WHAT IS SHE 59
per, buyer and the ultimate destination of the
goods.^
The Enemy Trading Act was a terrific weapon.
To international traders of the last year of the war
it represented powers which find no parallel short
of the Inquisition of the thirteenth century. No
merchant was too big or too small for the mesh of
its universal net, or too strong or too weak to bow to
its raised finger. The record of its enforcement in
Mexico alone would fill a book, but we are inter-
ested here in only two features, two outstanding
results.
The first of these was the fact that the consu-
late general, which passed decisions in 1918 on
over eighty million dollars of business, as well as
many consulates, came out at the end of the war
with a record for fair-dealing which netted them
intimate and friendly relations with ninety per
cent, of the firms trading with the United States.
The second was the fact that every one of our
consular establishments in Mexico had become a
warehouse of commercial and statistical data
unequaled for accuracy, thoroughness and scope
60 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
in^the history of our trade relations and complete
beyond the wildest dreams of the most rabid
promoter of international commerce.
Here was a God-sent chance so to knit the
commercial fabric of the two countries that any
threatened rupture would have raised a universal
howl of protest. What was in the way? Our lack
of any policy toward Mexico. "But we have a
policy," I hear you say, "a policy of watchful
waiting." Now think a minute and ask yourself
if that phrase has not long since become a mere
habit of thought. Admit that as far as Mexico
is concerned President Wilson neither watched nor
waited in any objective sense; he simply let things
slide.
At the crucial time of which I am writing the
American official representatives in Mexico adopt-
ed the slogan, "For heaven's sake, give us a
policy, any policy." They realized that with
our army still mobilized and equipped a mere hint
with the punch of a real, honest-to-goodness ulti-
matum behind it would have resulted in a negotia-
tion fairer to Mexico and more satisfying to us
WHAT IS SHE 61
than any treaty in the history of the two countries,
a negotiation whose importance to the peace of
this country would have loomed large even against
the background of the late League of Nations.
Why? Because let Armenia live or die, Mexico
we have always with us.
What was missing to this happy consumma-
tion? An ultimatum that meant what it said.
What is an ultimatum? It is the court of last
appeal built on the foundation of force, and on that
foundation stands the whole fabric of international
negotiation. So axiomatic is that statement that
the f ramers of the League of Nations had to bow
to it as a matter of course.
In spite of such frenzied appeals no policy was
forthcoming. Instead of plunging into the great
work of knitting a commercial bond with Mexico
the consulate general's labors were reduced to
sending out under instructions a form letter to the
effect that while current business could be encour-
aged no aid would be given to any new investment
in Mexico so long as Americans continued to be
murdered and American property rights violated,
62 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
The office which had been the hub of the whole
radiating fabric of an enormous international
commercial movement suddenly became a tomb
and its occupants so many brass monkeys. Our
Ambassador left the country and has never since
returned; the Consul-General resigned. Of the
large trained force which filled eleven rooms of the
Limantour Palace only two individuals remain
to-day.
In spite of all the accounts of almost daily
outrages in Mexico, murders of Americans, fac-
tional outbreaks, bandit activities and finally of
revolution, certain men who undoubtedly know
the country continued to assert that all was
going well and that they wished no governmental
interference of any kind. Were these men liars?
Not at all. They simply meant that everything
was going well for them. They provide us with an
excellent example of the ancient game of freeze-
out.
For instance: a great American concern an-
nounced that it was strongly in favor of keeping
hands off Mexico, that all wa well below the Rio
WHAT IS SHE 63
Grande. In the intimacy of a club-room I asked
one of its officials how he could justify such a
stand. "Well," he said, "it's this way. Where
we come in contact with bandits we have 'fixed*
them; where we touch the government Constitu-
donalistas we have 'fixed* them, too. Disorder
consequently suits us; mining claims are cheap,
competition scarce. We yell, 'Come on in,
fellers, the water's fine/ because we know they
won't come. In our business it's better to be
lonely than crowded."
So with banking, so with real estate, so with
what few industries are still running. If I have
given the impression that fortunes cannot be made
in Mexico whether she is in order or disorder I
have failed to get across with proof that she is
tremendously worth saving. Of course money is
being made, especially at the freeze-out table, for
chaos invariably carries opportunities to the lucky
few. But, were she honestly governed, were she
stable, were she redeemed from the stigma of an
outlaw among nations with which a cutthroat
oligarchy has besmirched her, her wealth would
64 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
soon be not only tripled but distributed to the
meek and lowly as well as to the rapacious. For
her, the chief blessing of internal peace would
share the attribute of mercy of the showers of
Heaven which fall on the just and the unjust
alike.
CHAPTER III
GOVERNMENT BY BANDITRY
THERE are two groups of major questions
which Americans are beginning to ask themselves
consciously or subconsciously about Mexico. One
is, "Are things going to continue to be as bad as
they are painted by some of the experts or as
lily-white as the advocates of self-determination
make out? If we really have to come to a con-
clusion whom are we to believe? By what talis-
man or touchstone are we to determine what is
and Vhat isn't the truth?"
The other group is represented by the impa-
tient man of affairs who says, "You fellows shout
about our national responsibility for the wreck of
Mexico. Here I've been tending strictly to my
own affairs and you say that while I wasn't look-
ing somebody has slipped a grindstone over on me
and that its name is Mexico. Now, how did I get
that necklace? I don't want it; I have no use for
it, but you say I asked for it. Show me."'
65
66 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
In reply to the first class of these enquiring
minds I would say that the touchstone for the
truth in regard to Mexico is a diamond with about
a hundred facets. Every one of these facets pre-
sents a different view to the superficial crystal-
gazer and it is no wonder that the general public
is confused when half a dozen seers peering in at
half a dozen facets shout to the world the contra-
dictory sights they see. Why these many angles?
In other words, why is the issue so confused and
how is the man-in-a-hurry to seize it long enough
to determine in his own mind and for himself what
is really what? Will he have to tabulate a hundred
different view-points taken by proxy? If so,
Heaven help him!
He will never come to that cry of despair if he
will read on and then draw on his private stock of
common sense. The Mexican issue is confused
because it is so near us, because so many people
have walked into it and out like sheep into a sheep-
dip and set themselves up as authorities on the
strength of the smell of Mexico that sticks to
them. Some of these men are honest but limited
GOVERNMENT BY BANDITRY 67
in intelligence or the sources of their information;
others, better informed, lack the peculiar breadth
of view which enables a man to stand off and see
a thousand incidents in a single sum; others,
mainly those who have suffered disaster to person
or property, become monochords that reduce the
tone of all events to the knell of their own catas-
trophe.
The issue is further confused by that weird
group of crusaders, some of them well-meaning,
all of them untrained and with one exception as
innocent of Spanish as of Sanskrit, who were sent
by our President as special envoys and were
allotted so many weeks each to unravel the intri-
cacies of the Latin mind, predict the coming move-
ments of the prize kaleidoscope among nations
and offer a solution based upon their colossal mis-
judgments. Of those envoys, one was man enough
to recant all the predigested panacea with which
he entered Mexico and publish his retraction in a
small volume of exceptional frankness; one other
wrote a broad-minded but radical report which was
suppressed. As for the rest, had I the space to
68 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
expose their predictions, fallacies and childish
conceptions in the face of what the years have
actually brought, never again would this country
subscribe to the presidential dictum that the
blind are the best leaders for the blind.
Somewhat allied to these blunderers but by
no means so ignorant are all those persons who
know Mexico but have an individual ax to grind;
people who have interest and people who look
forward to having interest there; concerns of all
kinds which by holding the inside track and em-
ploying the right men can make big profits out of
chaos in conjunction with no competition; mer-
chants keen on immediate sales irrespective of
how much greater their returns might be were the
relations between that country and ours reorgan-
ized on a sound basis; last, least and most despic-
able because they know better, those Americans
who sold themselves outright for thirty pieces
of Carranza silver, and with Cabrera, Nieto,
Berlanga, Baragan and Pani, a cabinet standing
on banditry, puddled their hands in Mexican
(and American) blood for a price.
GOVERNMENT BY BANDITRY 69*
The message I carry to the distracted enquirer
seeking the truth and with no time to peek through
the hundred facets of the Mexican touchstone is
first, examine the qualifications of the witness at
the bar; and first, second and all the time, look
for the motive behind the. spoken word. As a
people and individually we pride ourselves on the
application of common sense to our national and
private problems. Why not apply it to sources of
evidence?
The altruist is abroad in the land. Helped by
the natural aversion to all wars, just or unjust,
which possesses our people at the present time,
the genuine dreamer as well as the dreamer for
profit has been able to lull the national mind into
a state of coma on vital principles of right and
justice by the cries of, "Hands off!", "Watchful
jwaiting!" and "Self-determination!"
These are all excellent slogans in their place,
but has it ever occurred to you that the mere
shouting of a slogan does not get you anywhere?
Have you considered that the mere shouting of a
slogan is man's favorite method of " shirking re-
70 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
sponsibility and putting himself to sleep on a
troublesome issue. Have we kept hands off Mex-
ico? No; we interfered (as I will show later) in the
most naive and blunderous manner. Have we
been watchful or waiting since that solemn pledge
went out over seven long years ago? No. We
"'"""" -j"""
> have simplyjfet^thingsjljde^ As f or self-determina-
jfi^* tion, where is the legitimate limit of that experi-
ment? Isn't a century of catastrophe bringing
misery to millions enough of a try-out?
Right here you are thinking, "This man is an
out and out interventionist by force of arms. He
9 "} f
wishes to lead us to trouble." If that is your *
. foo C,
thought, you are wrong. I know^exican JUstory. ^
I know that we have already intervened in Mexico ^^
with colossal misjudgment and disastrous results.
I wish to point the way in which we may best
correct our error, pick up the pieces of a wreck; and
paste them together. I wish to lead my country
not into the trouble it is making for itself but away
and toward a lasting peace with a neighbor which is
and will be forever with us though it be against us.
GOVERNMENT BY BANDITRY 71
What right have I to set myself up as your
guide? You have no time to piece together the
thousand sections of the Mexican picture-puzzle
for yourself, but why should my work of art speak
straighter to your heart than the brightly colored
maps of altruists, optimists, Mexican propagand-
ists and American financial experts in the pay,
directly or indirectly, of whatever regime is tem-
porarily on top in Mexico?
I will again appeal to common sense. Why did
Henry Prather Fletcher resign as ambassador to
Mexico? I share the knowledge with many others
that this resignation originated in August of last
year, just three weeks after my own was accepted.
Here are two men, each with a long record in their
respective branches of our foreign service, who
resign from sinecures, one because he would not
be associated with a commercial debacle, and the
other because he refused to be dragged further
along the road of diplomatic emasculation.
Why did Fletcher force his resignation to ful-
filment? Because he was convinced that the
72 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
policy of the Carranza government had always
been one of obstinate hostility to the United
States; because he believed that the Mexican
people generally desired good relations with us and
would welcome an opportunity to enjoy them,
but that throughout Carranza's tenure of power
he deliberately defeated every effort on our
part to establish a better understanding and to
treat Mexico as a friendly neighbor. Because he
saw in Carranza a man who had a rare chance to
be of service to his distracted country but who
through three years, while the United States
magnanimously overlooked his rebuffs and made
advances time after time to come to some arrange-
ment which would be helpful to Mexico and her
people, never missed a chance to repel these ad-
vances with great parade of patriotism.
Because he knew that Carranza's uncom-
promising hostility to the United States, as clearly
reflected in his public documents and replies to
our many representations, was setting up an in-
sidious anti-American propaganda throughout this
hemisphere, formally repudiating the Monroe
GOVERNMENT BY BANDITRY 73
Doctrine and advocating alliances with European
and other countries and actual treaties with Latin
America aimed at undermining our friendships
and influence on this side of the world.
Because time and again as ambassador Mr.
Fletcher had pointed out without avail in reports
and memoranda that the attitude of the Mexican
government in conjunction with our utter lack
of any constructive policy was almost entirely
responsible for the unsatisfactory relations be-
tween the two countries and the treatment to
which Americans as well as some other foreigners
were subject in Mexico with respect to their lives
and property.
I know that these were the reasons behind Mr.
Fletcher's withdrawal because one cannot asso-
ciate intimately with a man for two years and
confer with him almost daily on questions of
commercial policy and routine without learning
the true trend of his activities and the basic
opinions that control his decisions.
So much for credentials. Whom will you
believe? The paid agents who make a vapid
74 is MEXICO WORTH:SAVING
statement that all is well with Mexico after nine
years of chaos if we will only possess our souls in
patience for another decade, a century or an
indefinite epoch? Will you believe the financial
sentimentalist on a salary who (in the face of the
fact that for three solid years our Ambassador
and every minor official held open the door to
any friendly arrangement) pleads almost with
tears in his eyes before the Senate Committee on
Mexico that we at least give friendship a trial?
Or will you believe men who turned their backs on
their personal interests rather than submit to
being the tools of disaster under the leadership of
a mind with which theirs did not run and which by
reason of its isolation they were powerless to
enlighten.
Carranza was at no time difficult to under-
stand; the only obstacle to comprehension on
our part was a stubborn determination to see
him and his cutthroat government under a
halo of altruistic phrases and never in their every-
day working clothes. The great accusation against
him as a leader is that his acceptance of banditry
GOVERNMENT BY BANDITRY 75
as a pedestal to his government was deliberate and
that not for a minute did he hesitate to clap the
ladder of race-hatred, once he saw its potential-
ities, against that pedestal and climb its easy
rungs to the eminence upon which he suddenly
ballooned much to his own surprise into the
champion of all Latin America against the
Gringo.
This was Carranza in the second of his three
phases, hibernation, meteoric triumph and col-
lapse, a man totally different from the silent,
immobile, blinking sphinx of three years ago,
a weak old man then, peering patiently into a
future which looked blank to everybody else
but which opened finally into a broad highway
hedged on one side by banditry, it is true, and on
the other by race-hatred, but an open road
nevertheless. What was the power in Carranza
which opened that avenue? You will laugh when
you realize that it was genuine, authentic, Simon-
pure potential and active Watchful Waiting. We
talked about it; he did it.
What does this mean? Does it mean that by
76 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
taking thought and never missing a move Carranza
had really developed into a giant in comparison
with what he was? It means just that; but,
fortunately for us, he was a giant whose stride was
hampered by a double manacle which sooner or
later was bound to trip him. What a shame,
what a crime against humanity, what an oppor-
tunity lost for the salvation of his own distracted
country, that the man who proved himself to
have contained the seed of greatness should have
taken the wrong turning at the crucial moment
of his career and led his people away from peace!
Had he not turned to feeding the military with
the nation's revenue he would years ago have rid
himself of the incubus of banditry and been in a
position to control revolt; had he not yielded to
the temptation of an easy and grandiloquent
popularity founded on his nursing of hatred for the
Gringo, he would have had such magnanimous
support from the United States as one nation has
never yet received from another. He might have
been a truly great patriot, radical where Diaz was
conservative, and yet a builder on ennobling
GOVERNMENT BY BANDITRY 77
foundations of lasting internal peace and inter-
national good will. As it is, what is this giant?
A Bhudda idol, done in gray stone, equable from
the feet up, but with those feet placed on two run-
away horses, outlawry and racial conflict. While
the old man succeeded in keeping his balance he
was wholly admirable as a high-priced acrobat,but
when he fell one surely heard the laughter of the
Aztec gods.
It is fair to consider what he might have done
to save himself at the start from an ultimately
untenable position. He might have created a
constabulary of his own, paid it well, established
it as the ostensible police of the Federal District
and, as his strength grew, played one quidnunc
general against another until he could clap the lid
on the pork-barrel against the military as a whole,
disband the army and take a man's chance to
hold himself erect behind the barrier of the nation's
resources decently and constructively applied.
In such an enterprise he would have had the active
and almost illimitable cooperation of the United
States. But as has been intimated in a previous
78 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
chapter, the moment for such action found him a
small man, immeasurably smaller than he was at
the time of his death.
Why was he responsible for the wide-spread
banditry in his country? Because he chose to
keep the nation's illusory war-machine and
very real and hungry corps of generals intact
but inactive and to do it without physical exer-
tion. What happened? The faster he shoveled
the wealth of the nation into the bottomless gullet
of the military, the more the military realized that
the fat days could endure only so long as the
outlawry throughout the country should continue
to give the military a reason for existence. We
will skip intermediary steps and depict the
"system" which inevitably came into being under
his regime.
The president appointed a minister of war and
received in recompense no cash but immunity
from attack; the minister partitioned the country
among eight generals of division and numberless
officers of lesser rank and received as direct con-
tributions in the form of outright graft from this
GOVERNMENT BY BANDITRY 79
source alone a monthly income of twenty thousand
dollars gold. The generals of division were almost
equally fortified against a rainy day. In the first
place, according to the statement of a high official
of the Mexican Treasury under Carranza, not
over forty per cent, of the millions handed to them
ever reached the troops for which the pay was
intended. But this is a mere bagatelle in the box
of tricks of an experienced Mexican field-marshal.
Without attempting to give a complete catalogue
of his liens on sudden wealth it may be said that
one favorite method was to harass a hacienda
worth a million, ravage it to the verge of extinc-
tion, buy it in for a song on the most legal and
orderly title and then settle on it such of his
cohorts as like the new home. Another: a town
lived by an industry, required protection and
could afford to pay for it. So much a month and
the contract was kept. Why? Because if the
industry shut down, so much a month would
become nothing. Another: a bandit leader
collected like tribute from a community located
in his private beat. Formula, bring pressure
80 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
to bear on the bandit only until he yields to a
fifty-fifty arrangement.
As with these master cormorants operating in
deals of six digits, so with the generals of the line,
the colonels, majors and commandantes, until one
came down to the last miserable cog in the
machine and found the common soldier uncon-
sciously adding a last finishing touch to Carranza's
Frankenstein creation by trading gun and cart-
ridges to bandits, in exchange for the first neces-
sities of life, in lieu of that pay which started to-
ward but never reached him. A vicious circle if
there ever was one. Do you see it? Do you
understand why Carranza was accused of govern-
ment by banditry? Lay for yourself your finger
on the link that made him own brother to every
marauder that devastated his unhappy country.
Obregon, the latest man on horseback, says
that he will put a stop to all this. It may be in
his power to cut down the weed, but without our
direct aid he can never uproot it, however sincere
his intention.
This question of internal banditry might pos-
GOVERNMENT BY BANDITRY 81
sibly be none of our affair, but how about the
other runaway horse, the policy of open enmity
to the United States? Its inception was as
opportune as the surrender without a fight to the
military and bids fair to be as far-reaching in its
disastrous consequences. How did it begin? Go
back again to Carranza hibernating in silence,
patience and immobility, watch him feeling with
his civilian antennae for the danger behind the
danger and finding it in the bugaboo of the)
Colossus of the North. Here was the unfailing
elixir which made a Samson of any puny leader
who could find an excuse for a cry of treason.
Why not grasp the life-giving cup of Mexican
popular favor and drink it all? Why not annex to
himself this source of danger and element of
strength? Why not become the concrete emblem
of a national and traditional hatred?
If actions speak louder than words there can
be no question whatever as to the fact that Car-
ranza formulated a definite policy of estrange-
ment, tried it out, found that it worked beyond his
wildest hopes, produced in fact an unexpected
82 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
miracle in bringing him prowess where he had
sought only safety. No wonder he followed it
thenceforth with a ponderous stolidity worthy of
a better cause.
What is the sequence of overt actions which
began with a trifling incident and which through
our policy of hands off grew to such proportions as
to inflate Carranza with the idea of establishing
himself in history as the rock upon which cordial
relations between Latin and Anglo-Saxon Amer-
ica were to split?
Let us start at the arrival of Ambassador
Fletcher, a diplomat by profession and as such
almost a sole survivor of the change in our national
administration, still wearing the laurels of a con-
quest of the collective heart of Chile, long es-
tranged against the United States. He was
appointed on his record to get results. He came
smiling with a genuine and avowed intention of
friendship. He wore that smile steadily for two
years without ever meeting the slightest glimmer
of response. It was a feat in facial'control which
has never been equaled for endurance on the stage
GOVERNMENT BY BANDITRY 83
of international relations and forms in itself a
story of personal interest.
Fletcher's first constructive move was to enter
into a gentleman's agreement with General Pablo
Gonzalez as spokesman whereby the United
States would release some millions of rounds of
ammunition long held at the border if the Mexican
government through the General would agree to
accept that action as a definite show of friendship
and use it as a soothing syrup on public opinion.
To carry out his side of the arrangement the
Ambassador made a special trip to Washington
and won his point with the President and the
State Department only after a hard and pro-
tracted struggle. The ammunition was released.
(Incidentally, this>was the sole occasion during
the three years of his mission to Mexico that the
Ambassador was allowed an interview with the
President whose personal representative he was
supposed to be.)
Now watch Carranza's move because it was
destined to become his classic lead. He repudiated
Gonzalez as his formal or informal intermediary
84 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
and caused^it to be given out in the press that
through the wise and powerful efforts of Bonillas,
the Mexican Ambassador to Washington, the
rounds of ammunition, property of the Mexican
government, long unjustly held at the border, had
been freed and were on their way to the capital.
The ultimate results of this initial move can
scarcely be measured in the space allotted, but
the immediate effects were what opened Car-
ranza's eyes to the potentialities of a policy
of continued estrangement from the United States.
To his mild surprise and General Gonzalez*
amazement, the General was promptly blotted
out as a factor in Mexican affairs. Automatically
he became a puppet, a nothing, so that months
later when with others he waited upon the Presi-
dent who was about to announce certain cabinet
appointments, Carranza could afford to go the
long length of refusing even to receive him.
That event announced to the public the birth
of Carranza as a strong man. He had come out
of hibernation. With no military force at his
back he had yet eliminated one of the group of
GOVERNMENT BY BANDITRY 85
enigmatically smiling generals and sounded a
warning to those remaining.
A Mexican general can read the writing on the
wall with his eyes shut, bandaged and covered
with a gunny-sack. He knows that for him there
are seldom two steps between power and a "passing
by arms" which is the Spanish euphemism for
being lined up before a firing squad. The poten-
tially wilful military leaders took thought and with
every subsequent slap given by Carranza to the
United States they took more thought and gath-
ered to the support of the "patriot" until to the
surprise of every one, himself included, the Su-
preme Chief was found to have grown up in the
dark to the stature of his grandiloquent title. To
the string of the pork-barrel which tied the
military to him originally he had added the pres-
tige of becoming the exponent sans pared of the
national tradition of hatred toward the United
States, a hatred which, sifted down, would be
found to be a genuine flame in the hearts only of a
loud-mouthed minority which unfortunately sets
the tone of the nation's printed thought.
86 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
What were the steps by which he clambered to
this eminence? They are too numerous for cover-
ing except with the stride of seven-league boots.
Three high-lights are enough to illumine the mass
of lesser affronts such as delays in the issuance of
exequaturs, refusals of every courtesy to the Em-
bassy which could be construed as signs of amity,
expulsion of Americans on thirty-six hours' notice
and in the face of protests, murders of others with
the most casual assurances of investigation never
fulfilled, and open encouragement of German
propaganda. Such trifles just failed of turning
Fletcher with his undying smile and patiently ex-
tended hand of friendship into a perpetual image
of patience.
But three breaks can not be passed over so
lightly. They were outrages to the etiquette of
common decency which is supposed to govern the
intercourse of nations not at war.
One of them was the cynical and hypocritical
boasting of Carranza in a message to Congress
that the massacre of American troops at Carrizal
was the result and the triumph of his orders to the
GOVERNMENT BY BANDITRY 87
\
Mexican army to expel Pershing's punitive expedi-
tion (directed solely against Villa) from Mexican
soil. This incident of brag aside from its value as
an illustration of the point at issue, is character-
istic of one of the longest established of Mexican
tactics, the falsifying of events to fit the uses
of a national pride absurd to the point of childish-
ness in its assumption of non-existent power.
Another arose from the sending of a succession
of sterilized missions to the United States, Nieto,
Pani, Cabrera; Cabrera, Pani, Nieto. Here also is
a side-light which exposes Mexican skill at passing
the buck. It has been said that as a master of the
toothpick of subterfuge the Mexican has no peer
and his favorite stroke has been, is and will be the
sending of unofficial envoys at any given pinch and
their subsequent repudiation when the apex of
pressure is past.
There came a day when. Nieto, blinded by a
sense of his own growing importance, forgot this
old rule and took one tentative step on his own
account. He was in Washington on one of the
periodic missions which he well knew meant
88 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
nothing, showed up at the State Department and
was literally swept off his perch of insincerity by
the outspoken frankness and cordiality with which
he was met. The informal attitude of our govern-
ment was one of willingness to negotiate any and
all differences from a standpoint of generosity
rather than intrinsic justice. Why not have
Fletcher up and get to work? What could Nieto,
a man posing as an envoy, do but consent? The
Ambassador was summoned post-haste and after
many hours of labor he and Nieto framed "a
preamble looking toward a tentative settlement"
of all acute questions pending between the two
countries.
It is too bad that that document cannot be
printed here in full as a unique exhibit of the
lengths to which we were prepared to go in our
publicly declared policy of showering benefits on
Mexico and as a categorical answer to the vapid
pleadings of certain men that we at least experi-
ment with an attitude of friendship toward
Mexico.
What was the fate of the preamble? While it
GOVERNMENT BY BANDITRY 89
was still in an embryonic stage Nieto awoke to the
fact that in spite of his chief executive's apparent
acquiescence by silence, he himself was a fake
envoy like all his predecessors. He declared that
negotiations had reached such a point that nothing
further could be settled at Washington. As a
consequence Fletcher /"still smiling, climbed on the
train and accompanied Nieto back to Mexico
City.
Immediately upon the arrival of the travelers
the terms of the preamble were published in the
press. / They .were so frank, so reasonable, so
charged with the spirit of compromise to. practical
ends, so imbued with the new order of open
diplomacy that a surge of hope rose in the breasts
of all those who knew to what dazzling heights
of prosperity the country might rise under their
aegis.^ So profound was this aspiration that its
explosion on the following day produced a theatri-
cal, almost a dramatic, anticlimax. Nieto was
publicly repudiated by official announcement in
every newspaper of the capital and fell from favor
never to recover; the tentative agreement was
90 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
unceremoniously scrapped, torn up without con-
sideration of any nature, consigned to the waste-
paper-basket. The action was a scandalous
affront to the American Ambassador, such a slap
as leaves no outward mark but brands the spirit
for a lifetime.
The most alarming exhibit in Carranza's policy
of estrangement, however, passed over the Am-
bassador and struck at the President of the United
States. Our propaganda committee had arranged
an excursion of a score of Mexican newspaper men
to Washington where President Wilson addressed
them. In spite of the evidence already to hand
as to the deep-seated malignity of the Mexican
government, he declared once more that under no
conceivable circumstance would the United States
resort to arms for a settlement of any difficulty
with a weaker nation. The speech, cabled in full
by the enthusiastic correspondents, was published
broadcast and produced a remarkable and im-
mediate impression.
What was Carranza's countermove? He dug
out our government's strong note of April 2, 1918,
GOVERNMENT BY BANDITRY 91
protesting in no uncertain terms against the con-
fiscation of American oil land titles and which had
lain unanswered for two months in the Foreign
Office. Ignoring the formality of notifying the
Embassy of his intention, he ordered it published
in the press without comment. Read President
Wilson's speech, read the note and then take off
your hat to Carranza. He won, not by a length
but by a lap. At last there was not a man who
could read in Mexico who must not perforce
recognize the patriot, the champion not only of
his own land but of every other between it and the
toe of Patagonia.
Would you not think that by the same token it
would have become apparent to the White House
as well as to the world at large that the inevitable
head-on collision between abstract altruism and a
concrete fact had occurred? At the price of incon-
sistency we actually issued one ultimatum to
Mexico, the note of April 2, 1918, that meant
business and thereby saved the product of the oil
fields to the Allies, but apparently this incident
has failed to teach its true lesson, namely, that
92 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
when it came to an absolute showdown Washing-
ton had to threaten force as a matter of business
even while it was shouting benevolence from the
housetops.
The second paragraph of this chapter was
devoted to the impatient man of affairs who wants
to know why and how we are responsible in large
measure for the chaos in Mexico. Go back and
read his questions; there is no room to repeat them,
but here is the answer. There has been only one
abnormal period in the history of Mexico since it
attained independence almost exactly a century
ago. That abnormal period coincided with the
years of law and order under the Diaz regime.
The revolutions which have occurred since 1910
differ only in one respect from the many that pre-
ceded 1876. They mark the intervention of the
United States in the internal affairs of Mexico.
The professional pacifists and press-mongers
who sling the word "interventionist" at every man
who is working for a prompt settlement of our
many outstanding differences with Mexico, lest
neglect lead us deeper into the mire, are invited to
GOVERNMENT BY BANDITRY 93
step back half a dozen years and see where and in
what an astounding manner intervention origin-
ally occurred. Mr. Lind, a native of Sweden,
naturalized an American, who knew no Spanish
and nothing of Mexican affairs, was chosen as the
goat on whom we loaded the naive mission of
proposing to the President of Mexico, already
recognized as such by several leading powers, that
he step out and hold an election in which the
Mexican people should freely exercise their choice
of an executive, himself barred.
Had we stopped tat barring Huerta from the
free choice granted his fellow countrymen our
indiscretion would have remained merely an
amusing freak in international dealings, but in the
months which followed we went further. We
casually gave out certain doctrines which should
have been gravely pondered. It sounded well to
announce that we would not recognize in Latin
America any man who arose to power through
force. We announced it; apparently with no
forethought of the absurdities into which such a
F-baked doctrine would unfailingly lead us.
94 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
It was only a question of weeks before Mr.
Bryan was faced with a proposition to accept any
one of a list of prominent Mexicans who had taken
part in none of the revolutionary movements on
foot. What happened? Did he stick to his hap-
hazard doctrine? I quote from the sworn evidence
of Mr. W. F. Buckley before the Senate Sub-Com-
mittee on Foreign Relations. "Mr. Bryan thought
over this for a long time, and then finally told me
frankly that the American government would
agree on nobody for provisional President but
Carranza. I finally asked him, then, if the Amer-
ican government would be consistent in the policy
it had announced with regard to Huerta and
would agree that since Carranza was to be pro-
visional President he must not be a candidate for
permanent President, and that the American
government would not recognize him as such.
Mr. Bryan said, 'No; Carranza must be provi-
sional President and permanent President.* This
ended the conference."
Notice those words, "must be." We assisted
Carranza to become by force President of Mexico.
GOVERNMENT BY BANDITRY 95
We seated him as effectually as one picks up a little
boy and planks him in a chair; only, we failed to
exact from him a promise to be good. From the
very start he had given strong evidence of every
intention not to be good, but President Wilson
persevered through thick and thin in a blind
belief that by letting him do as he pleased he would
ultimately be overwhelmed by magnanimity and
do as pleased us. I ask you, who have been the
interventionists and to what an end?
Concurrently with establishing firmly on its
feet an oligarchy which for graft and oppression
of the weak has never been surpassed in the
history of the New World we abandoned our own
flesh and blood on a scale which make the ravages
of the Barbary Pirates against whom we sent our
first punitive expedition a picayune affair. This
abandonment is the true overshadowing crime of
the long tragedy of errors of a century of contact
with Mexico.
What gave rise to the new doctrine that an
American alone of all the nationalities of the
civilized world has no right to protection beyond
96 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
the limits of his own country? A Republican
administration had advised Americans living in
outlying districts in Mexico to gather in the big
cities for protection until danger had blown over.
This counsel may have been ill-considered but
by the very terms in which it was addressed it was
stamped as provisional. No sane man could or
did think at the time that a Democratic adminis-
tration would attempt to found upon it a denial
of the fundamental principle of liberty upon which
our government was founded. Nevertheless Pres-
ident Wilson drew from it the disastrous inspira-
tion to order over forty thousand Americans to
abandon outright homes, property and employ-
ment and return to the United States.
I will not present here the personal hardships
and loss arising from that order; I shall only
depict the spirit in which the proclamation was
made. It stipulated that it should be published
broadcast to every one assuming authority in
Mexico in the most unequivocal terms that the
fortunes of those Americans who could not possibly
get away would be vigilantly watched over and that
GOVERNMENT BY BANDITRY 97
those responsible for the sufferings and losses of
Americans would be held to a definite reckoning.
The italics are mine; the years that have passed
since the vain boasting took place lie at the door
of the man of broken promises.
What have those years brought forth? A sea
of notes couched in like terms and never sustained,
protesting against an ever-growing stream of
outrages; murders of Americans, confiscation of
their rights, destruction of their properties. But
far greater than this material damage is the
destruction of the honorable conception of Ameri-
can character in the mind of every Mexican, high
or low. They have grown to know us for Ears,
and far from acknowledging our pusillanimity as
forbearance, they despise us heartily as cowardly
betrayers of our own flesh and blood.
Were this betrayal of any avail to Mexico itself
it might offer ammunition to the international
pacifist, but the contrary is the case as will be
proved in the course of this book. Suffice it to say
here that through a blind and ill-considered inter-
vention we were responsible for the establishment
98 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
and continuance of government by banditry in
Mexico. We might have secured guarantees before
taking so drastic a plunge. Instead we sent the
blind in the form of a naturalized Swede into the
Latin maze and followed the blind into a mire.
There is a wide-spread reluctance in the United
States to grasp the nettle of the Mexican situation,
but we are going to do it sooner or later whether
we like it or not, the later the harder. We need
not worry to-day as to the initiation of the project
so much as to how we may perform this service to
ourselves, to Mexico and to humanity once and for
all. We too stand at a parting of the ways no less
momentous than the crossroads which saw Car-
ranza take the wrong turning three years ago.
The case of Jenkins was not settled by the
release of Jenkins any more than the cases of
hundreds of murdered Americans have been
settled by the exchange of a long succession of
formal notes, all identical save for the variation
in the names of the victims. With Obregon clam-
oring for a fresh deal and naively suggesting that
bygones be bygones, we are at the threshold
GOVERNMENT BY BANDITRY 99
not of an immediate decision but of such a
bandying of words as will deafen statesman and
citizen alike if we do not awake to the fact that the
fallacies upon which Carranza founded his govern-
ment by banditry have run away with Mexico.
They have taken root, they have grown. No
longer can they fall and wither with the destruc-
tion of any one man.
It may be said that Carranza spread an illusion
of strength. Wrong. No one man can launch a
whole nation on the road to perdition through
illusory power alone. It is silly to assume that
because a man has built for himself a pedestal out
of the rotten rubble of subornation, evasion,
casuistry, subterfuge and trickery that the
pyramid will crash with the downfall of the indi-
vidual. Carranza has passed away, destroyed by
the very agencies that made him, bribery and
and race-hatred, two snowballs rolling down-hill,
but his handiwork will stand.
What did we get out of the years during which
we practised an amazing tolerance, abandoned
our own flesh and blood, surrendered rights
100; JIS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
held dear through all our previous history and put
up with insult piled on injury? Was it peace? No.
It was a country in chaos; a government all altru-
ism, idealism, attorneyism from the lips out and
carrying the torch of arson, banditry and oppres-
sion in the active hand. Led disastrously along
the road of enmity it grew to new proportions, for
strength is strength whether its source be evil or
good. Eighty per cent, of Mexico is naturally
peaceful, thirteen of her fifteen millions are in-
capable of hating Americans save through sug-
gestion. That suggestion was supplied through the
spectacle of Carranza immune in the face of our
lazy and self-defeating benevolence and that sug-
gestion has already reached such lengths that the
first thought of a peon on coming across a strayed
American is to kidnap or murder him.
Mexico under Carranza developed not so much
into a sick people as into a national pervert,
a potential monster born out of social wedlock
and nursed by our negligence into repulsive vigor.
With the assistance and consent of some powerful
internal element we must stem and bend its
GOVERNMENT BY BANDITRY 101
spirit, lash it to some permanent and basic
girder which will guide it willy-nilly into the
path of national and international righteousness.
The need for that basic girder, its nature and mode
of application will be the subject of further chap-
ters. In the meantime, forget that Mexico was
once a yapping cur. Take down the old placard,
"Beware of the dog;" put up the new sign, "Look 7 "
out for the knife at your back."
CHAPTER IV
ROBBERY BY DECREE
IMAGINE that a student of political economy
has been a recluse for ten years, hand him the
Mexican constitution of 1917 and all the printed
edicts of the Carranza regime, suppose that he
reads them. What would be his justifiable im-
pression? He would have to admit that the
millennium had arrived and that the perfect state,
the complete republic, the final consummation of
the rights of man, was in full swing south of the
Rio Grande. That would be a perfectly logical
conclusion, yet the most casual observer of actual
conditions knows that they gave the lie to any such
conviction from inference.
Right here we come up against the fortress of
the altruists, pacifists, dreamers, selWetermina-
tionists and internationals who find an almost
inexhaustible stock of ammunition in the pub^cly
declared principles and intentions of the Mexican
Constitutionalist government. It is not their
102
ROBBERY BY DECREE 103
business to square these declared principles and
intentions with the astonishing contradiction of
the results actually obtained. They sail content-
edly on a sea of print and, the deeper that sea, the
easier it is to befog the public mind in regard to
genuine issues.
It is the affair, however, of every man who
wishes to sum up for himself the problem of our
confused relations with Mexico to get a clear
mental picture of this tremendous contradiction;
a state apparently organized along lines of perfec-
tion which is simultaneously the greatest existing
national seat of oppression, robbery, murder,
disorder and governmental chaos. How shall we
go about the painting of that picture? By plung-
ing at once to the fundamental paradox of the
Latin mind which turns out laws with the ease and
perfection of a machine producing sausages and
then reverses itself, devours its own young, and
returns to the position known as "as you were,"
once more completely lawless.
It is unnecessary to support that statement by
specific illustration. Read any twenty of the
104 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
manifestos issued by successful and unsuccessful
revolutionists in Mexico during the past century
up to and including the declaration of Obregon,
and you will find an extraordinary similarity in
the assertion of high and progressive aims (notably
with reference to the division of lands and the
redemption of the peon). It will also be found
that heretofore all these grandiloquent programmes
have subsequently gone by the board along the
self-same road of oligarchial graft and govern-
mental peculation.
We are not especially concerned here with this
endless repetition of history however illuminating
it might prove to died-in-the-wool supporters of
self-determination, but we are concerned in point-
ing out certain distinctive features imposed by
the late Mexican government on an age-long pro-
cedure. It is just as well to line up these high-
lights in plain English. First, the constitution of
1917 which raised the hair on the heads of all con-
servatives and reactionaries is not really a terri-
fying document; justly enforced it would be found
to embody much that is admirable along progres-
ROBBERY BY DECREE 105
sive lines of national conservation. Second, the
opportunities for such just enforcement were
exceptional in the case'of Carranza but he allowed
himself to be diverted by a motive which was in
direct opposition to success and which incidentally
threatened incalculable damage to the United
States and its Allies during the World War. Third,
he adopted, not by printed declaration but by
action, the principle of robbing the foreigner estab-
lished in Mexico to a specific end.
To begin with, let us put our fundamental
paradox on a clean plate and look at it. The hy-
brid Mexican is a wonderful law-maker. Let us ac-
cept that fact at face value without tracing it back
to its Roman source. Just where do his admirable
laws go wrong? At the very joint of enactment and
execution. They are stillborn. Why? Because
the dynamic germ has been eliminated from the
Latin's make-up. He is a breeder of ideas no
longer capable of imbuing his offspring with an
active principle. Every educated Mexican knows
the statement to be a fact; Obregon knows it.
Here we have the kernel of the so-<ialled Latin
106 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
American enmity toward the United States. In
the case of Mexico it is not strictly enmity; it is
hurt pride arising from the recognition deep in the
heart of every intelligent Mexican that he can
trade and dicker with the best of us and come out
top dog, but that he can establish no major indus-
try, no constructive factor in the progress of his
country requiring an infusion of dynamic energy,
without borrowing that infusion from another
race. He realizes that the material salvation of
his country lies in foreign money controlled by
foreigners and that ultimate spiritual salvation can
come only with the far-off domination of new
blood through immigration. Show him that this
double absorption would bring happiness and
prosperity to a score of millions of his compa-
triots and his individual pride will still rise to
choke him because no man however craven can
be expected to admire the setting of his own sun.
These are deep waters but we must paddle in
them to appreciate wherein lay the greatness and
the downfall of Porfirio Diaz. In his day he was
a giant and attracted giants. His day is past and
ROBBERY BY DECREE 107
the rise of another dictator, even if he were equally
strong and level-headed, would bring only tem-
porary alleviation to a chaotic condition. In this
connection it is just as well to state that this book
is in no sense reactionary. It does not advocate
a return to any golden age but it does aim at
an enforcement of justice by means well within
our power and still in line with the progressive
principles which the Carranza regime blared to
the world at large and consistently betrayed at
home.
Returning to Diaz, his greatness arose from the
fact that he accepted frankly the need of foreign
initiative for the material redemption of his
country. He opened his arms wide to foreign
capital and enterprise and once embarked on that
policy the protection of life and property through-
out the length and breadth of Mexico became a
mere corollary, a matter of course. For a quarter
of a century there was no country on the face of
the globe where constructive forces found greater
security, fairer treatment or a broader field.
The response was immediate and its scope tre-
108 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
mendous. The history of the twenty-five years
during which American capital alone poured a
billion dollars into Mexico is an epic too long for
inclusion here, but the annals of foreign develop-
ment show no cleaner page than this story of
the industrial birth of a nation. I said that
Diaz attracted giants. They did not know they
were giants; the men who called them by their
first names, slapped them on the back and bor-
rowed money from them probably thought of
them as either rough-necks or highbrows, but to
those who look back now down the short vista of
fifteen years their true stature is beginning to be
revealed.
They have a monument in the size of the wreck
which followed their passing. The patched rem-
nants of rolling-stock which have survived eight
years of persistent train-dynamiting, the vermin-
infested and ragged coaches which once were
palatial, the industries destroyed, the silent mills,
flooded mines and looted banks which dot the
length and breadth of Mexico to-day, loom above
the dead level of a destroying flood of organized
ROBBERY BY DECREE 109
graft and robbery by governmental decree and
give the true measure of the heyday of Diaz and
of the men who were its direct product.
What killed Diaz? An overdose of success
along a single line of ambition. He was the lonely
prophet of the New Pragmatism in his country.
In surrendering to the crying need for foreign
initiative in its constructive affairs he uncon-
sciously grafted practical and efficient buds on the
old stock of what up to his time was a completely
sterile though loud-mouthed idealism. He was
so taken up with putting Mexico on the map
industrially and commercially that his programme
along that single line not only outdistanced equally
important subsidiary reforms but fairly ran away
with him. In his old age he was no longer the
master of his destiny; he was being driven.
The best illustration available out of many
showing the phenomenal success of Diaz and also
giving an example of the heavy clouds which
overshadowed his downfall is to be found in the
history of the Mexican banks.* What American
For a comprehensive and up-to-date review of this subject. e
110 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
in or out of Mexico can believe to-day that the
Bankers' Panic of 1907 found that country with a
better banking system than our own? That ex-
ceptional position was largely due to American
and other foreign investments as is demonstrated
by the figures showing the advance of resources
during the years of industrial activity.
In 1897 the paid capital and surplus of Mexican
banks of issue was only $23,500,000 and their total
resources amounted to a little over $69,500,000;
by 1909 these figures had gone over $117,000,000
for capital and surplus and the resources of the
various institutions of credit had passed $380,-
500,000. During the same period these banks
had reduced unpaid capital from $6,470,000 to
$509,650 and showed an increase of paid capital to
$59,400,000 as against $18,025,000 and a reserve
fund of $25,654,047 in 1909 as contrasted with
$3,126,131 in 1897. In the ten years from 1899
to 1909 the auxiliary banks increased their paid-in
capital from $3,000,000 to $23,500,000 and their
Present and Past Banking in Mexico, by W. F. McCaleb. Harper Bros.,
to which volume I am indebted for many facts and figures.
ROBBERY BY DECREE 111
reserve funds from nothing to $3,444,058, their
total resources being published at $64,187,516.
These figures are sufficient to give to the lay
mind a graphic picture of the reflex action of a
tremendous industrial boom on Mexican finance,
but, as a matter of fact, they illustrate as well a
period of dangerous kite-flying and stock-jobbing
on the part of certain of the banks. Limantour,
the greatest of the giants who gathered around
Diaz and the watch-dog of the nation's resources,
was the first to sound the alarm and on February
tenth of 1908 wrote a letter to all the chartered
banks summoning their representatives for a con-
ference. On June nineteenth of the same year the
national congress supported him by enacting in
ioio his bill for the reform of the banking system.
It is a matter of great regret that the revolution
should have intervened before this movement
could be got fairly under way.
Summing up the situation at the close of the
Diaz regime as it affects American interests we
find two outstanding features: (1) a billion
American dollars had been drawn into Mexico
1 12 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
and were represented by the soundest of assets
such as railways, producing mines, smelters, foun-
dries, mills, factories, various industries, planta-
tions, ranches and city real estate; (2) the finan-
cial system showed distinct inflation and while
some of the banks were intrinsically sound, others
were so extended as to justify the appointment of
receiverships. We were directly responsible for
the first of these conditions and may be proud of
the record; with the second, we had nothing to do
beyond the isolated outright failure of a private
American banking concern.
Between the downfall of Diaz and the final
advent of Carranza there occurred only two
administrations which influenced the course of
Mexican finance. We may eliminate the usurpa-
tions of the machinery of government by Villa,
Zapata, and Obregon during his first occupation of
Mexico City, but we cannot pass over the terms
of Madero and Huerta without leaving a blank
which must be filled to give an idea of the con-
ditions which confronted and still confront
the Constitutionalist government. Madero's ad-
ROBBERY BY DECREE 113
ministration found an actual cash balance in the
national treasury of $32,000,000, converted it into
a deficit and obtained authorization from Congress
to float a loan of 20,000,000. Huerta inherited
the deficit and the authorization and promptly
took advantage of the latter to place six million
of the twenty-million-pound loan with Paris
bankers who held an option for the remainder
which they subsequently refused to take up.* As
a consequence Huerta placed certain amounts in
New York and then forced various bond issues on
the local banks until they had absorbed $31,827,-
879 against which they issued notes for a like
amount.
According to law they should have held a fifty
per cent, metallic reserve against this emission,but
in the terms of a special edict by Huerta under
date of January 7, 1914, the Department of Fi-
nance could authorize banks to increase their cir-
culation up to three times their holdings. Even
this concession was of no avail during a panic when
* The most reliable figures give the actual distribution of this twenty-
million-pound loan as follows: French group. 45.125%; German group.
19%: English group. 19%: American group. 11.875%: Banco Nacional
de Mexico. 5%.
114 IS MEXICO WORTH-SAVING
specie had all but disappeared from circulation and
it was already impossible for the banks to adjust
themselves. They were in a bad way and knew it.
It is necessary to point out just here where all
this talk of banks and banking touches American
interests or the career of Carranza with reference
to the United States. As regards the first of these
points, the Huerta bonds are the one national
obligation which the Mexican government has
declared it will never pay; consequently it is of
profit to the investing public to know just how the
loan came to be issued and on what authority.
As to the second, note that the banks were forced
by the Huerta government to exceed their issues.
This point is of vital connection with Carranza's
policy of robbery by decree as will be shown in the
course of this chapter.
Carranza, as has been previously stated, came
finally into power through the arbitrary support
of the United States, but his ultimate advent was
hailed by no psean of joy on the part of the insti-
tutions of credit of his country. Why? Because
as early as December of 1913 his attitude toward
ROBBERY BY DECREE 115
them had been set forth in a circular making oner-
ous demands on the banks situated in the territory
which he had overrun. By February of 1914 his
Constitutionalist government had issued Circular
No. 8 taking over the Nogales branch of the Banco
Nacional and that of the Banco de Sonora, the
parent Banco de Sonora and the branches of the
Banco Nacional in Hermosilla, the Banco Minero
and the agency of the Banco Occidental, all of
whose debtors were ordered to suspend payment
until the institutions could be liquidated.
I will admit at once that Carranza's position as
regards finance when he came definitely into power
was of a trying nature, but it was not desperate
for one sole reason, in the long run he could have
had the support of the United States. He floated
into the capital on a sea of fiat monej^ one issue
after another of which depreciated at such a pre-
cipitous rate that panic became the normal atmos-
phere for government as well as for the business
public. Not all of this "say-so" money was of
Constitutionalist origin. It has been estimated
that as many as two hundred separate and distinct
116 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
issues were scattered broadcast by one authority
and another over the length and breadth of the
country, but we are not directly interested here
in the absorbing chapter of frenzied paper finance
in Mexico. What we need to know is the condi-
tion of the banks at Carranza's assumption of
power and what he did to them.
W. F. McCaleb in his authoritative book sums
up the dark side of the picture as follows: "While
we are casting up balances at the end of 1915, we
may not overlook the Caja de Prestamos, which
came into existence in 1908. . . . Here as per-
haps nowhere else, the criticism holds true that
the banks were operated in Mexico largely in the
interest of the parties in control. It is a pathetic
commentary on the high purposes of President
Diaz to show that the Caja de Prestamos, which
was expected to relieve multitudes of farmers,
restricted its loan operations to a few conspicuous
haciendados and real-estate speculators of the
Republic."
Now take the reverse picture from the same
authority. "It doubtless is true that some of the
ROBBERY BY DECREE 117
banks were badly managed. It is, furthermore,
certain that some of them had made loans which
would have worked out losses even in normal
times; but that all the banks were in this category
is, of course, an absurdity. And the very fact
that the government made no effort to distinguish
between good and bad institutions is a blunder
from which there can be no escape. According to
its own statement, as published officially, three
banking establishments were solvent and three
had suffered only impairments of capital. Why,
then, should these institutions have been closed?"
This quotation carries jis ahead of our story.
When and how did Carranza wipe out the banking
system of Mexico? The Huerta emissions, nine
in number and totaling l 7,320,029, (out of which
sum the banks in Mexico had been bled to the
tune of 11,197,708), had dealt a terrific shock.
The blow fell on a banking system that was al-
ready assailed by the hardest of general condi-
tions; it laid that system low but could not kill it.
For this purpose a bludgeon was require^ and it
was formed out of the following Carranza decrees.
118 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
(1) Decree of September 16, 1916, by which
the concessions of the Banks of Issue were can-
celled and a term of sixty days was granted them
for raising their metallic reserve to an amount
equal to that of their circulating bills. A Board of
Confiscation (Consejo de Incautacion) was ap-
pointed for each and every one of the banks and,
finally, it was ordered that no operations should
be made without the authorization of the Depart-
ment of Finance. It was naturally impossible for
the banks to increase their reserves under the
terms above mentioned for, besides sixty days be-
ing a preposterously short term for such an opera-
tion, the paper currency circulating at the time had
completely withdrawn from the market the metal-
lic currency and even the bank bills. The govern-
ment itself could not furnish the necessary specie
but even assuming the possibility of obtaining the
metallic medium, the terms of the decree, forbid-
ding every operation without government author-
ization, made an ironical farce of the exorbitant
demand.
ROBBERY BY DECREE 119
(2) The Decree of December 14, 1916, based
on the regulations of Number 1 , (which could by
no stretch of possibilities be complied with) deter-
mined the liquidation of the banks.
(3) The Decree of April 6, 1917, stipulated
that the Banks of Issue be liquidated by the
Department of Finance and that should it be
found in the course of such liquidation that any
bank was unable to balance its liabilities against
assets, the liquidation should be carried out under
the laws governing bankruptcies! It is beside the
mark to point out that the value of much of the
collateral which might have enabled certain banks
to make a fair showing under this decree had been
deliberately wiped out by the action of the
government.
The Machiavellian wording of these decrees,
taken as a whole, is a masterpiece of obfuscation
intended to confuse the simple mind intent only
on discovering where lies justice and bewildered
by any argument, however logical, which results in
a conclusion that "mine is thine." How will the
reader grasp the magnitude of Carranza's clubbing
120 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
operation better than by thinking of his own local
bank, its capital, resources and treatment by the
authorities, and then turn to the tragic fate of
the Banco de Londres y Mexico.
I choose this bank as an example because It was
in no sense a Mexican concern except in that it
operated under a Mexican charter. The group of
its stockholders was made up of the best French
and Spanish elements in Mexico, France and
Spain, its manager was a Britisher, it was a model
of modern banking principles and owned its own
splendid plant. Now notice the figures. It was
the second largest Bank of Issue in Mexico with a
fully paid up capital of $10,750,000, a reserve of
$2,992,500 and bills in circulation to the amount
of $18,721,141. Its published statement of July,
1916, showed cash on hand amounting to $10,406,-
065, of which over $5,000,000 was held in gold and
silver specie and $4,250,000 in actual gold and
silver bullion.
Why should Carranza have swept such an
institution along with others of good record into
the discard? Was it because of the sins of their
ROBBERY BY DECREE 121
colleagues or because he wished to establish some
ideal system of finance still undreamed or because
he needed to clear the boards for a single central
and national bank of emission? You can find
wordy support for any one of these answers but
the admission of Carranza's Chief of the Depart-
ment of Banking to the effect that the Carranza
government looted $24,906,108 in actual cash
from the vaults of the unhappy banks describes an
action which cries aloud for justice above the din
of high-sounding official explanations. "He need-
ed the money," is the true answer.
As though it were bent on exhibiting itself
before the world of finance in a ridiculous light,
the Constitutionalist government prepared an act
under date of December 13, 1918, setting forth in
great detail the rules for the establishment of (1) a
single national bank of emission, (2) mortgage
banks, (3) auxiliary banks, (4) agricultural banks,
(5) petroleum banks, (6) banks of deposit. This act
was a gem but it was nevertheless withdrawn,
ostensibly because it was realized that the country
was by no means ready to swallow another dose of
122 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
fiat money. The ludicrous reality was a bird of
quite another feather. The clauses stipulating
that all capital stock was to be fully paid up in
advance and that every bank was to hold fifty
per cent, of its deposits in cash proved too much
for the sobriety of a public before the spectacle of a
frankly thieving government still thickly bespat-
tered with stolen jam.
What is the sum total of the situation to-day?
Mexican finance is still limping along under the
moratoriums established in the far-gone days of
Huerta; Mexican credit has been steadily dis-
credited; Mexican domestic and foreign obligations
are still at a standstill in deferment; Mexico is
completely stripped of a national banking system
of any kind whatever.
"If these things are true," you ask, "how ac-
count for the great volume of business we are doing
with Mexico?"
The answer to that is that foreign business in
the sense of trade does not require a whole banking
system but only that least productive of banking
attributes which is devoted to the manipulations
ROBBERY BY DECREE 123
of exchange. The private institutions which are
carrying on this branch and this branch alone of
financial activity in Mexico are called banks only
by courtesy. They are making money and are
enabling others to make money only as agencies of
exchange, pure and simple. They back no enter-
prise, carry no loans, insure no construction, open
no credits, and even refuse deposits except under
specific restrictions as to responsibility. Living
under a sword of Damocles the credit institutions
of Mexico have decided to do without a neck.
Having witnessed the gutting of the nation's
institutions of credit by governmental decree let
us turn to the Mexican constitution of May, 1917,
fathered by Carranza, and examine it not only for
the effect it is bearing on our relations with Mexico
but also with a view to tracing the progress of
Carranza as an individual along the path of delib-
erate enmity toward the United States. As was
stated at the commencement of this chapter, the
latest Mexican magna charta, if justly enforced,
would be found to contain much that is admirable
along progressive lines of national conservation.
124 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
The reader is invited to hold in mind that quali-
fying clause, "if justly enforced." Of the one
hundred and thirty-six articles which make up the
new constitution only four need be discussed.
, Article 33 contains the following clause: "The
f Executive shall have the exclusive right to expel
/ from the Republic forthwith, and without judicial
process, any foreigner whose presence he may
deem inexpedient." Read that over and see if
you can devise any wording which would make the
autocratic power granted more absolute. Its
victims have no recourse whatever beyond the
sense of justice of whoever happens to be President
of Mexico. Of what avail has this dependence
upon fair play been to Americans during Carran-
za's tenure of office?
I know of three cases of Americans expelled
from Mexico under this clause since May of 1917.
The first was a merchant and land-owner who had
been established in Mexico for thirty years and
was deported through the influence of his Mexican
rivals in business on the pretext that he had con-
formed with the Enemy Trading Act of the United
ROBBERY BY DECREE 125
States to the detriment of certain firms under its
ban. The second was that of a correspondent of
the Associated Press who was arrested in Mexico
City and shipped on the long journey to the border
with no preparation whatever and in circumstances
which made of his deportation an outrage unneces-
sarily brutal and indecent. His offense was the
filing with the censor of a message covering a point
of fact which happened to show the ruling power
in an unfavorable light. The third was that of a
mild chemist, startled out of a humdrum existence
with his Mexican wife and a child, neither of whom
spoke a word of English, by the accusation of
having supplied a bomb to bandits. The fact
that the true culprit surrendered himself to the
authorities did not save the chemist; the edict for
his expulsion had been issued.
Every one of these three cases brought forth
the vehement protest and appeal of the American
Embassy not only without avail but with a cynical
denial of fair play which seemed to joy in the
opportunity to snub our representative and give
him a triple bath in well-worn and unctuous
126 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
phrases already grown soapy to the touch through
long usage. Every one of the three cases repre-
sented a gross miscarriage of justice, robbery of
personal liberty by decree, and, taken in the light
of other Carranzista interpretations of the new
laws, they give weight to the contention that the
extraordinarily drastic phrasing of Article 33 was
part and parcel of a project to make life miserable
for Americans in Mexico.
Article 72 of the Mexican constitution of 1857
provided that, "The Congress shall have power to
promulgate mining and commercial codes which
shall be binding throughout the Republic." Under
this authorization the Mexican mining law of
November 22, 1884, stipulated that "petroleum
and gaseous springs, are the exclusive property
of the owner of the land, who may therefore
develop and enjoy them, without the formality of
entry or specia adjudication." The mining law
of November 25, 1909, under the same constitu-
tion stipulated as follows : "Art. 2. The following
substances are the exclusive property of the owner
of the soil: I. Ore bodies or deposits of mineral
ROBBERY BY DECREE 127
fuels, of whatever form or variety. II. Ore
bodies or deposits of bituminous substances."
Now read the following excerpt from the con-
stitution of May, 1917, Article 27, which is too
long for more than the most cursory examination
here. "In the Nation is vested direct ownership of
all minerals or substances which in veins, layers,
masses, or beds constitute deposits whose nature is
different from the components of the land, such
as solid mineral fuels;
petroleum and all hydro-carbonssolid, liquid
or gaseous." To complete the vicious circle, add
to the above the following clause from Article 14 of
the constitution of May, 1917. " No law shall le
given retroactive effect to the prejudice of any person
whatsoever"
Consider that in reliance upon the mining laws
duly executed under the constitution of 1857,
American companies purchased and leased petro-
leum tracts in Mexico and in good faith sank
$200,000,000 in this enterprise alone; consider
that no American companies are developing oil in
Mexico except on privately-owned property and
128 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
that no American company enjoys rights to drill in
any land acquired by gift or concession from any
Mexican government, read again the word-for-
word quotations from Mexican national docu-
ments given above and square, if you can, justice
against the edicts of Carranza, the individual,
ordering the confiscation of all American-owned oil
tracts in Mexico, robbery by decree on a royal
scale.
Common sense tells you that his pretension was
absurd. It would be to-day but was it absurd at
the time he conceived it? Look back with me and
think. The German drive which occurred in the
early spring of 1918 was persistently rumored in
Mexico months before it took place. American se-
cret service agents on the track of other matters re-
ported time and again that Carranza considered
himself to be in possession of convincing assurance
that the balance of the war would be turned def-
initely for the Germans by May of 1 9 1 8. We know
now how nearly good were the reasons for that
assurance, and, knowing that, does it mean any-
thing to you that Carranza issued his famous
ROBBERY BY DECREE 129
confiscatory decree in February of 1918 and in the
same month sent a large contigent of troops under
General Lopes de Lara to the oil fields?
To the members of the highest naval and
shipping circles who know how vital was the con-
tinued supply of Mexican fuel oil to the success of
the United States and its associates in the World
War, these facts had and have a deep significance.
Against apparently overwhelming economic argu-
ments for at least a neutrality benevolent toward y
the cause of the Allies, Carranza had stuck con-
sistently to the strictest application of a published
"paper neutrality" toward all belligerents but,
wherever it was possible to do so without incurring
actual danger, had shown favor to the German
cause. His essays in favoritism grew bolder as
what, he was convinced, was to be the day of Ger-
man victory approached and culminated in the
expulsion of the editor of El Universal, the lead-
ing Mexican daily and a whole-hearted supporter
of the allied cause.
Why did shipping experts worry about Car-
ranza's confiscatory decree of February 19, 1918,
130 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
in connection with his frequent propounding of
the tenets and duties of neutrality? Because they
had reason to believe that as soon as circumstances
on the western front justified the risk he intended
to seize the oil fields for the nation and then declare
that being the property of the nation and the
nation in turn being neutral, no oil could thence-
forth be supplied to any belligerent to the detri-
ment of another.
It was this realization which rang the alarm in
the halls of the Department of State at Washing-
ton and forced it under date of April 2, 1918, to
address such words as the following to the Mexican
government. "The United States cannot ac-
quiesce in any procedure ostensibly or nominally
in the form of taxation or the exercise of eminent
domain, but really resulting in the confiscation of
private property and arbitrary deprivation of
vested rights In the absence of the
establishment of any procedure looking to the
prevention of spoliation of American citizens. . .
it becomes the function of the Govern-
ment of the United States most earnestly and
ROBBERY BY DECREE 131
respectfully to call the attention of the Mexican
Government to the necessity which may arise to
impel it to protect the property of its citizens."
Fine words and vain promise! Add one to the
family of executive lies which have been fathered
during the long years that have passed since
President Wilson published broadcast to all assum-
ing authority in Mexico that the fortunes of
Americans would be vigilantly watched over and
that those responsible for their sufferings and
losses would be held to a definite reckoning!
The effect of our surprisingly strong note of
April 2, 1918, was two-fold. To begin with it
stalemated, as it was intended to do, any attempt
by Carranza to stop for the benefit of Germany all
export of oil. You would think that that result
would carry with it an abandonment by the
Mexican government of its confiscatory policy.
It might have, had it not been for ourselves. To
his own astonishment Carranza was to learn in
the months that followed that we had only re-
sumed in this note our lately acquired practise of
talking loud about justice and subsequently sub-
132 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
mitting to every form of national indignity and
individual outrage. The palliatives which have
been secured to the drastic decrees of Carranza
affecting oil holdings have been acquired not by
our government but by private effort and group
rebellion.
Article 27 of the new constitution has given
rise to another important branch of the enterprise
of robbery by decree. One of its clauses directs
the Congress and State legislatures to enact
laws for the purpose of carrying out the division of
large landed estates and stipulates that the owners
shall be bound to receive bonds of a special issue
to guarantee the payment of the property ex-
propriated. On the face of it that sounds reason-
able and in accord with the most advanced views
on national conservation; but think a minute. You
have a tract of land for which you paid actual cash
under the best possible title secured by the laws of
the country at the time of purchase. It is pro-
posed to divide that land among the penniless
members of the nearest community, in itself an
admirable project. But what do you get in ex-
ROBBERY BY DECREE 133
change? A basket of waste-paper backed by
Federal and State governments which are already
flagrantly in default to creditors in almost every
civilized country on the face of the globe.
Some of these agrarian laws are already being
used as a lever to pry loose the unwilling dollar of
land-owners and several American investors have
been heavy sufferers, but suffice it to point out
here that the application of the regulations govern-
ing the subdivision of lands furnishes an excellent
example of how the altruistic laws of the Mexican
actually work out in practise. In many cases a
local board is entrusted with their enforcement.
I have yet to hear of such a board in Mexico which
is not amenable to bribery. As a consequence the
proprietor who is on the job is subjected merely to
buying himself clear of the law. What would be
bkckmail in any other country, in Mexico, to the
g^eat misfortune of jts_ masses, is daily bread to
the party in power.
^Summing up this rapid review of the confisca-
tory aspect of Carranza's Constitutionalist govern-
ment, what have we for our pains? The knowl-
134 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
edge that we need not blush for the manner in
which we contributed over a billion dollars to the
industrial birth of Mexico; the conviction that
bad faith, ill-will and malicious intent were
at the bottom of Carranza's open abandonment of
the road to peace with the United States, and the
well-founded assumption that there has been a
concerted action on the part of the authorities of
the Constitutionalist party, still in power in Mex-
ico though now headed by O^regpn, to drive
American enterprise from its territories even if in
so doing they cut the nose to spite the face of
their own distracted country.,
CHAPTER V
WHY ARMENIA
IT IS less than eighteen months since our former
Ambassador to Turkey, lately nominated to the
post at Mexico City, made the statement that
"the best thing that could happen to Turkey
would be to be under military occupation ofjome
Allied country for ten years; if this is not done we
will see existing there such conditions as now
prevail in Mexico." Mr. Morgenthau went on to
suggest that Turkey be placed temporarily under
a protectorate of the Allies or of America.
It is only a matter of weeks since Europe and
many Americans were discussing the pros and
cons of mandataries for the United States in
Armenia, Africa and equidistant points. Have
you forgotten how to laugh? If not, doesniit
amuse you tobiTTold that if we do not take
definite action on the other side of the world,
conditions there will become as messy as those on
our own doorstep during seven years?
135
136 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
The American public mind is long-suffering,
easily led by constituted authority but not
easily rushed into demanding action from such
authority. When our troops were about to land
in Vera Cruz in 1914 the President appealed to
Congress in the following terms: "I therefore
come to ask your approval that I should use the
armed forces of the United States in such ways,
and to such an extent, as may be necessary to
obtain from General Huerta and his adherents the
fullest recognition of the rights and dignity of the
United States." The Congress replied within
forty-eight hours, "The President is justified in the
employment of the armed forces of the^United
States to enforce his demand for unequivocal
amends for certain affronts and indignities com-
mitted against the United States."
Was there any full-throated protest from the
American people against this leadership and its
possible consequences? On the contrary. There
was a wide-spread feeling of satisfaction that at
last a spring-cleaning, too long delayed, had been
WHY ARMENIA 137
got under way, and everybody settled down com-
fortably to undergo the stirring up of a little dust
in order to clear a large accumulation of rubbish
and attain the lasting peace of a house in order.
What happened? The President had gained the
impression from one of his personal emissaries who
by race and training was as far removed from the
inner workings of the Latin as is the North from
the South pole, that once our forces landed in
Vera Cruz and lifted the standard against Huerta,
hordes of Mexicans would flock to its support.
It would be a peaceful occupation. It is difficult to
conceive of any man, however intent on ignoring
natural laws, persuading himself that if you kick
your foot into an ant-hill even with the best of
intentions the ants will get behind and push.
Nevertheless, the fact stands.
Nobody who really knows Mexico will deny
that there is a large conservative element in that
country which prays diligently for the applica-
tion in one way or another of the strong hand of
the United States toward the permanent settle-
ment of its internal affairs, but the very intelligence
138 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
which influences this considerable body of men
leads them to keep their prayers dark. Even
under the most favorable auspices they would not
dare acknowledge in public the conviction which
holds sway in their innermost hearts. Out of
self-respect, self-conceit and self-preservation as
individuals, if for no other reason, they are bound
to resist openly what they secretly desire.
This truth, widely known to al[but our __ChidF.
Executive in 1914, led the administration into a
bog. Much to its own consternation it found itself
in the face of an alternative which, put concisely,
read as follows: make war or crawl. It had had
no intention of making war. It was not prepared
to make war. It had been merely engaged in the
game of playing one mental attitude against
another and as soon as real blood began to flow,
it halted in dismay. In the face of the full
authorization of Congress, the tacit, matter-of-
course approval of the vast majority of the
American people, and the demands of the press
that Funston's troops be ordered to advance on
Mexico City, the administration seized on the
ARMENIA
ptcteil of an inlniMtmnal cooren
gKm^ of tint lyig still dings to OS
as a nation- If it were only that we did not get
vocal or any other at JOT MIS for certain
airronts aiiG i TV! ! gn i tiss cojumi^cc
Uidted States/' we coulc pass it incident up arid
try to forget it along nitn the iD-fated Perdung
npcdrtion. But in the ught of subsequent events
we rMMMJ" aflurd to do that. Why? nrcame we
are only now beginning to realize that the vadla-
txns of 1914 were <astnns far be>-ood their
These vaoilaricwg laid bare the hy| K M iisjf wlikli
says one thing on theory and levtises itself in the
bee of hard bets; they inaugurated the so-called
poficy of "hands off," whatever the provocation;
they persuacec tne igzcrar.t MlBBEHi tLat we
were reaDy as weak as his leaders asserted and
convinced the leaders that they could go the
refl into apathy at Ac loss of a chance to start the
Mexican machine on a straight track and worst of
140 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
all at the present juncture of world affairs, they
planted the seed of ridicule among the too-hopeful
provisions of the project for a league of nations.
With Mexico surrendered absolutely into our
sphere of influence by Great Britain and France,
the two countries most involved next to the
United States, we were gravely called upon to
consider mandataries in Turkey and Africa when,
after seven years, we had been unable to stay either
by negotiation or the employment of pressure or
the application of the golden rule, the outright
and avowed Bolshevism inaugurated under our
very noses.
What thoughtful American brought face to
face with the reign across our border of a corrupt
oligarchy carrying in its wake lasting benefit to
none and misery to millions, spurning friendship,
disavowing every international usage, living by
blackmail, sustaining and sustained by banditry,
countenancing murder as a means to undermining
the prestige of the foreigner and daily denying its
own guarantees to life and property, can restrain
himself from lining facts against fancy, illusory
WHY ARMENIA 141
hopes for distant mandataries against the reality
next door, and confessing that somebody has been
asleep in the conning tower of the ship of state.
At the time of its occurrence the occupation of
Vera Cruz appeared to be a necessity; looking back
at it from a vantage point of only six years we
know that the score of Americans and the hun-
dreds of Mexicans who gave up their lives on that
occasion died futilely, a sacrifice to the ignorance
of a national leader who had his head buried not
in sand but in the clouds. In this case high aims
brought us no compensation whatever; no single
benefit arising from evacuation of the port has
come to light as a counterbalance to the long line
of wreckage which marks the track of the supine
policy which the event inaugurated.
In opposition to Mr. Morgenthau's implied
opinion of conditions in Mexico we continued to
find in the press periodical statements of certain
individuals interested in that country to the
effect that Mexico under Carranza was not in a
state of anarchy, that his government was
engaged in a battle for genuine reform, that
142 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
public carrier agencies were operating satisfac-
torily, that reports as to insecurity of life and
property were exaggerated and that, generally
speaking, conditions were as good as could be
expected. In a previous chapter the workings of
the "freeze-out" table were fully described.
Just as it was possible to find a man calling
himself an American venal enough to pay bail for
Jenkins against Jenkins* will and thus cut the
ground from under the State Department and
afford a loop-hole through which our administra-
tion could slip and once more betray one of its
citizens (and in this case its official representative)
to such a shamefully unjust hounding as few men
have ever suffered, so it is possible to find others
who are willing to step deliberately under the wing
of any oligarchy in control of Mexico for personal
profit even though that wing happens to be em-
ployed in smothering the long-established inter-
ests of their fellow countrymen.
You say this may apply to business men but
would not reach that distinct division of mission-
aries who were the most persistent defenders of
WHY ARMENIA 143
the Carranza regime unless it can be shown that
they are the recipients of subsidies. There are still
more ways of killing a cat than by choking it with
milk. Would it give you a new slant to learn
that no foreign clergyman of any category what-
ever has a legal right to exercise his profession in
Mexico? I quote from Article 130 of the constitu-
tion of May, 1917. "The law recognises no juri-
dicial personality in the religious institutions
known as churches. Ministers of religious creeds
shall be considered as persons exercising a pro-
fession Only a Mexican ly birth may
te a minister of any religious creed in Mexico."
Add to that the following from the same
Article. "No minister of any religious creed may
inherit, either on his own behalf or by means of a
trustee or otherwise, any real property occupied
by any association of religious propaganda or
religious or charitable purposes. Ministers of
religious creeds are incapable legally of inheriting
by will from ministers of the same religious creed
or from any private individual to whom they are
not related by blood within the fourth degree."
144 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
Now read paragraph II of Article 27. "The
religious institutions known as churches, irrespec-
tive of creed shall in no case have legal capacity
to acquire, hold or administer real property or
loans made on such real property; all such real
property or loans as may be at present held by the
said religious institutions, either on their own be-
half or through third parties, shall vest in the
Nation, and any one shall have the right to de-
nounce property so held. Presumptive proof
shall be sufficient to declare the denunciation well-
founded. Places of public worship are the property
of the Nation, as represented by the Federal
Government, which shall determine which of them
may continue to be devoted to their present
purposes. Episcopal residences, rectories, semi-
naries, orphan asylums or collegiate establish-
ments of religious institutions, convents or any
other buildings built or designed for the adminis-
tration, propaganda, or teaching of the tenets of
any religious creed shall forthwith vest, as of full
right, directly in the Nation, to be used exclusively
for the public services of the Federation or of the
WHY ARMENIA 145
States, within their respective jurisdictions. All
places of public worship which shall later be
erected shall be the property of the Nation."
What do you gather from these three quota-
tions? First, that an American is prescribed by
constitutional law from exercising any religious
function whatever in Mexico; second, that he can
neither hold nor inherit church property, third,
that there is no such thing as church property.
In the face of all this fundamental legislation there
are still American missionaries in Mexico, in
possession of all the church property they had
when Carranza came into power. The only dif-
ference is that through no fault of their own, they
lived for years in the hollow of Carranza's hand
and by his individual grace instead of in God's
keeping. Most of them were honest, bewildered
and silent; the ones who talked, naturally had to
talk for Carranza and talk loud.
Those who took advantage of the fact that the
American public cannot easily check up on opti-
mistic assertions regarding Mexico and defended
Carranza to the day of his downfall (and no longer)
146 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
were given the lie by the Mexican press itself.
During the six months ending with January of
this year Mexico City papers reported twenty-
seven major train outrages distributed over the
states of Chiapas, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Colima,
Durango, Jalisco, Mexico, Michoacan, Nuevo Leon,
Puebla, San Luis Potosi, Sinaloa, Vera Cruz and
Yucatan. These widely separated states are just
half the number which make up the Mexican Fed-
eration and represent over half its total territory.
Rebel activities during the same period of time
showed raids, outrages and engagements with
Federal forces as follows: 4 in the State of Agua-
scalientes; 13 in Chihuahua; 4 in Chiapas; 8 in
Coahuila; 8 in Colima; 14 in Durango; 5 in the
Federal District; 2 in Guerrero; 3 in Hidalgo; 17
in Jalisco; 20 in Michoacan; 2 in Tabasco; 7 in
Tamaulipas; 33 in Vera Cruz; 4 in Zacatecas; 2 in
Nuevo Leon; 4 in Uaxaca; 23 in Puebla; 3 in San
Luis Potosi and 7 in Sonora; 183 disturbances in
19 states and the Federal District out of a possible
total of 29 self-governing divisions of the so-called
Republic.
WHY ARMENIA 147
These lists are by no means complete; they
are compiled from published accounts in the Mex-
ican daily papers whose sources of information
were not only limited but subject in frequent cases
to suppression, as is evidenced by the summary
expulsion from Mexico of two American news-
paper correspondents for filing despatches cover-
ing matters of fact.
Defenders of the Carranza regime were fond of
pointing out such passages as the following from
the new constitution. "Article 31. It shall be the
duty of every Mexican to compel the attendance
at private or public schools of their children or
wards, when under 15 years of age, in order that
they may receive primary instruction and mili-
tary training." Also Article 73, paragraph XXVI I :
"The Congress shall have power to establish pro-
fessional schools of scientific research and fine
arts, vocational, agricultural and trade schools,
museums, libraries, observatories and other in-
stitutes of higher learning."
Bombast. Read the other side of the picture,
148 IS MEXICO^WORTH SAVING
the side presented daily to public view and so self-
evident that not a single voice was raised in pro-
test when on February second General Alvaro
Obregon, who four months later was to be the self-
appointed Nemesis of Carranza, stated in a speech
before a large audience in Mexico City, "The
penal colony is not large enough to hold the
poor men for stealing bread while bandits drive
through the streets in luxurious automobiles,
fruits of their systematic robberies, the wit-
nesses having been assassinated in the cells
of the penitentiary. There will be no justice in
Mexico while the school teachers have to live on
charity while mistresses pass them flaunting
jewels."
Does this mean that General Obregon will
prove a savior for his country? Hardly. The
General's assertions brought forth no denial of the
facts but got the following reply from Don Jenaro
Moreno in an interview given to one of the prin-
cipal papers of Mexico City. "Practically since
1916 the administration of justice has been in the
hands of the partisans of Obregon The
WHY ARMENIA 149
consuming sore upon which Obregon has placed
his finger originated in his own camp and each
day goes from bad to worse."
As early as February of this year the non-
partisan Excelsior of Mexico City published a
unique editorial of prophecy entitled, "Into
the Dark." It said, in part, "To judge by appear-
ances there is not the remotest hope that the
coming elections will result in a triumph of democ-
racy. Out of the silence which guards the future
there does not come even assurance that the
public peace will be safe. And this is because the
purposes of the original revolution have not only
failed but the revolution has been smashed into a
thousand bits Revolutions which do
not substitute a better condition for the one they
overthrow, result in division and disaster
What do we face at this moment? A campaign of
hatred unlimited, an implacable war of extermina-
tion It is no longer possible for one to
deceive himself. From the sparks of this fire will
be lighted the flames of the future civil war. . . .
. . . Zero, and how much do you carry forward!
150 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
"It was as a means of diminishing these irrita-
tions which are precursors of another upheaval
that the plan was adopted to launch the candidacy
of Bonillas. But the candidacy of Bonillas
strikes us as a joke. It seems to us not so much
like Nero playing while Rome burns as like
Harlequin singing to the moon on a stormy night.
Nice Mr. Bonillas! Estimable Mr. Bonillas!
Why do you sally from your house in the midst of
this cloudburst without an umbrella?
"No. Here we have no solution
Thus we proceed. Thus we go blindly into the
darkness without purpose, without destination,
without a known road through an unknown coun-
try with an abyss on either side, in the midst of a
tempest in which the very name of the Fatherland
seems to have effaced itself from the conscience
of the Mexicans."
It is a curious thing that Americans in general
are better informed on the racial intricacies attend-
ing reforms in Turkey than they are on the con-
flicting elements across our own border. There is,
of course, a natural explanation of this fact. Under
WHY ARMENIA 151
date of February 12, 1920, Mr. Gerard in his
capacity as Chairman of the American Committee
for the Independence of Armenia sent to Arthur
J. Balfour of the British government a cable in
which the following statements appear: "Amer-
icans have already given $30,000,000, and are now
being asked another $30,000,000 for Armenian
relief. There exists here preponderant opinion
favoring America's aiding Armenia during her
formative period."
Americans are not in the habit of giving away
$30,000,000 to a specific cause and planning to
double the amount without first getting a pretty
definite idea as to the need and the uses to which
the money is to be put. This feature alone of
charity on a large scale puts an obligation of
investigation not only on the many contributors
but more especially on those prominent persons
who accept leadership in the movement and^in the
application of funds. In other words, if at any
time there had been a nation-wide campaign for
contributions in money for the relief of misery in
Mexico we would have gained a general concep-
152 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
tion of conditions in that country at least equal
to our public knowledge of Armenia and its needs.
Philanthropists and all lesser charitable per-
sons have a right to ask, "If there is or has been
misery in Mexico comparable to that in Armenia,
why have we not been asked to help?" The
answer to that question is, "Carranza." Holding
power largely through a policy of enmity toward
the United States he could not consistently allow
his countrymen, whatever their necessity, to feed
from the hand he so often befouled. The records
of the American Red Cross bear eloquent testi-
mony not only as to sufferings in Mexico at various
times but also as to the reception given by Car-
ranza from the inception of his power up to the
day of his death to offers and efforts at relief
by Americans.
In the Red Cross Magazine for November,
1915, it is stated that, "Twenty-six thousand
applications for aid have been investigated and
approved by responsible organizations and indi-
viduals As many as 3,400 persons
have made applications at headquarters in a single
WHY ARMENIA 153
day, besides hundreds who applied in other places.
The total quantity of soup delivered
from August 5 to September 4, inclusive, was
553,575 liters Through a special
arrangement a number of cases of extreme starva-
tion requiring medical attention have been treated
in the American Hospital."
In the face of these conditions the Red Cross
was ordered out of Mexico on October eighth at the
request of General Carranza and as a preliminary
to our recognition of his de facto government on
the following day. The Red Cross made the fol-
lowing guarded announcement: "At the request
of General Carranza and with the advice of the
American Department of State, which was con-
sonant with the request, the American Red Cross
discontinued its relief activities in both southern
and northern Mexico October 8, and Special
Agents Charles J. O'Connor and J. C. Weller,
whose enterprise, hardihood and efficiency in
^
relieving the starving populace have brought
them much praise, have been withdrawn."
Covering the period of thirty days ending Sep-
154 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
tember 25, 1915, Mr. J. C. Weller, special agent of
the American Red Cross, submitted a report to
that organization which if it could be quoted in full
would prove an eye-opener to those who doubt that
the enmity of the Constitutionalist government
to the United States was not a passing whim but an
active policy of long standing. Sandwiched in
between accounts of attacks by Carranzistas on
the Red Cross and looting by them of its supplies,
we find this statement, "Before leaving us the
Carranzistas were very anxious to know about the
success of their compatriots with the Texas revo-
lution. They were very much surprised when I
told them that the Texas trouble was practically
over. They seem to be under the impression that
the Carranza lines were extended to within a
few miles of San Antonio. They left me, shouting,
'Adios, Gringo; we will see you in San Antonio.'
This was not a small party of men, but the general
impression was there were some 1 ,200 men in this
command It is evident that the
chiefs have been promising these men a paseo in
WHY ARMENIA 155
San Antonio when they take it This I heard
from several men who ranked as high as captain."
Speaking of the make-up of the Constitu-
tionalist party which is in power to this day,
whether led by Carranza or Obregon, and has run
true to form, Mr. Weller says, "In conclusion I
only regret that some of our higher-up Govern-
ment officials could not have been with me to
see the brand of individuals that are now in con-
trol of the situation in Mexico. They do not repre-
sent any of the good element in Mexico
General Ellisondo, in command of a district
larger than Massachusetts, is a boy 24 years old,
uneducated and absolutely irresponsible. General
Zuazua was formerly classed as a saloon bum
around Eagle Pass. A lieutenant colonel in com-
mand of a territory as big as Rhode Island was
sent to the Mexican Army for stealing horses and
cattle. These are not the exceptions but the rule.
I do not find any difference between
the Carranza faction and the Villa faction, with
the exception that Pancho Villa seems to have a
better control over his men Having
136 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
tan in personal contact with both factions. I
believe tlmt it wonlo! be a crime to turn loose- this
Mme .'00.000 haiulitx thieve:, a no! scapegoats on
the* country."
Mi Wtlkr'l description ot the class of men
commanding Canan/a's tioops in northern Me\
ico applies equally to Obregon's leaders at the
pic-sent Jav. That statement is not put forwaul
ttsanaspnr.ionlul nu u 1\ a:, a point of fact which
\\c aiul Ol.ic-fcoii will have ti> lace SIHMU-I or latrr.
That Caitan/a'.s atlitiulr to\\aul Aiunican rrlicf
never changed was evidenced by the account
piintal in /-.'uc/M'tn i>( l-Vhmaiy thiul of this year
of the telnitl ailiiiinistc'iul ti> the American l\c\l
Cu>ss as \\c\\ as ti> the American Chamber of
Conmu-ice ol Me\n o when they attempteJ to
u-iuler a'ul to the thou>aiuls ol sufferers from the
u-ic-nt raithijuake in the State of Yera Cur/. The
staiul taken ly the authoiitics forced the Chamher
tt> let in n all subscriptions to its one million peso
fund to the honors. The Rc\l Cross expeiulevl i>\ci
ten tlunu^aiul iLllars through the American Ci>n-
snl aiuK out emplateilseiulin^a relief unit until it was
WHY ARMENIA 1*7
unoflkiafly advised that such an
received with any degree of cordiafity by the
Mexican authorities,
U die nature A the distress in Memo which
cannot be given in a angle paragraph became it
ftrike* below the level A surface charity and if
founded on condition* which fink the subject
of specific relief to relief of die nation a* * whole,
In other word*, it lead* us straight to die field of
controversy where those of us who are for taking
sensible, immediate and final action as regards
internal condition* in Mexico are fined up against
die advocate* of chaot as its own cure*
Pint rf afl, one cannot emphasize too strongly
the fact that the population of Mexico is not a
homogeneous mass. It is made up of three dis*
tinct dements which can be roughly divided in the
present day as follows; the bourgeoisie who lived
a life of ease under Diaz; the parvenus who have
displaced them under Carranza and the vast,
over thirty dis
158 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
tinct tribes embraced under the single term of
peon. The first and second of these divisions
number about ten per cent, each of the total;
the peons make up the eighty per cent, to balance.
It is with this submerged eight-tenths of the
Mexican peoples that we are especially concerned
here, not necessarily from any motives of altruism
but because their well-being and prosperity are
becoming more and more linked to ours and, in
the same proportion, the causes of their oppression
and misery are merging with the causes which
make Mexico an impossible neighbor. To put it
in plain English, what we do for the peon,^we do
for ourselves, and his salvation from subjugation
under a century of so-called self-determination
would carry with it a clean-up of the reign of
banditry and graft which is at the bottom of our
present fermenting troubles with Mexico.
The case of the inarticulate common people of
Mexico is a sad one. From the time the republican
government was constituted in 1 824 to the advent
of Diaz in 1876 they suffered under thirty-four
presidents, (twenty-five of whom were generals)
WHY ARMENIA 159
and an emperor. In forty-eight years they were
whipped about by thirty-five administrations
practically all of which came into power by
violence. Bring that statement home by asking
yourself what would happen to your own or your
children's development if we were to select a
president a little of tener than bi-annually by force
of arms.
Eliminating the purely nominal interim of
Gonzalez, the strong arm of Diaz held the country
in subjection for twenty-five years. As I have
shown previously, Diaz brought about the indus-
trial birth of Mexico, but he was powerless to make
his basic social reforms keep step with the meteoric
rise of industrial prosperity. At the end of his
reign, except for the bare benefit of a quarter of a
century of unaccustomed peace, the lot of the
peon was no^better than before his advent. Fol-
lowing Diaz, eight presidents held the reins of
government in the short space of the four years
which preceded the ascendancy of Carranza.
With governments changing at such a rate
Americans are justified in assuming that the peons
160 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
who represent twelve million out of a possible
total population of sixteen million must be gener-
ally turbulent. Nothing could be further from
the actual truth than such an assumption and it
is almost as damaging to the cause of American
aid to Mexico as the misguided preachings of
those who honestly but ignorantly believe that
Mexico is a self-governing republic and not a series
of oligarchies each of which has sucked the blood
of the prostrate peon until to-day he is actually at
a lower level of autonomy than he was under the
Aztecs.
I unhesitatingly make the assertion that the
common people of Mexico, all that vast sub-
merged division which has become colloquially
branded under the name of "pelado," (which
literally translated means "phdred") ; s naturally
of a peaceful disposition, laborious though sloth-
ful, inclined through very indolence to honesty,
incapable of concerted action and astoundingly
inarticulate.
Such being the case, it is natural to ask, how
account for the innumerable bands of rebels and
WHY ARMENIA 161
outlaws which infest the country from border to
border and sea to sea? I will tell you and the
answer is worth remembering when you next
come across any grandiloquent manifesto of
would-be or actual Mexican authorities. The
Mexican recruit never knows and never has known
what he fights for. He never by any chance says
"The general," "the colonel" or "the captain,"
but always, "My general," "my colonel," "my
captain." His service is always immediate and
personal, never objective.
This leaves us still at sea as to why he serves.
In the first place, conscription is an established
principle in Mexico; in the second, the peon
through the length and breadth of the country
lives on Indian corn and beans. He eats other
things but as a last resource he depends absolutely
on corn or beans to ward off actual starvation. As
a result his sole lasting and unchanging inclina-
tion is to plant and gather these two harvests.
This fact makes him exceptionally vulnerable.
All a bandit or a federal leader in need of recruits
has to do is to descend on some fertile valley and
162. IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
destroy or steal the year's crops. The peon is left
with Hobson's choice, he must either join the
robbers and himself live by plunder or die.
There are, of course, exceptions to this general
rule and in certain localities the habit of plunder
has been taken on by the humble agrarian as an
avocation. Having learned the trick, he is apt
to pull off a train hold-up and then bury his arms
and quietly return to his fields to the confounding
of occasional pursuit. On the other hand, in at
least one large district the plague of government
and other bandits has come up against a wall of
armed resistance where organized planters of
every degree have made good their intention to
protect their crops.
But the sum total of the situation is that the
country is kept in constant turmoil by the vicious
circle of depredations having its origin in corrupt
authority and apparently coming back like a
boomerang to embarrass that authority. De-
fenders of the Carranza oligarchy pointed to this
embarrassment as a legitimate obstacle which the
government was striving to overcome. They re-
WHY ARMENIA 163
fused to recognize what every Mexican knew to be
true in his heart, namely, that the Constitu-
tionalist regime under Carranza drew what breath
of life it had from the continuation of 'banditry in
one form or another.
Under its baleful reign an element heretofore
exempt from absolute penury was dragged down
into the necessitous condition of the peon with-
out having the habitual power of endurance
inculcated by centuries of oppression into the
"pelado" to fall back upon. I refer to what we
would term the government brain-workers and
skilled mechanics of the middle class, the low-
salaried clerks, school teachers, modest employees
and industrials who looked to government for pay
but were not in positions where their honor had a
cash value.
The distress of this element during the last four
years, while sixty per cent, of the total revenue of
the country (greater than ever before in its history)
was being handed to the military as one hands a
stick of candy to a naughty child to keep him
quiet, beggars description. One thousand skilled
164 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
mechanics, discharged from the national railways
at a time when but for Carranza's insistence on
keeping the trouble-pot with the United States at
a boiling point the railway shops would have been
running to full capacity, applied in a single
memorandum to the American Consulate General
for facilities to cross the border.
The plight of the government employees in a
stricter sense of the word was worse. School teach-
ers starved or committed suicide; hungry-eyed
clerks, debarred by chance from all those various
posts of responsibility where one can fall back on
graft, blackmail or embezzlement, were cut down
in pay until they walked to and from their pre-
carious employment looking like specters held
to life by a thin-drawn thread of hope in the face
of desperation.
While cabinet officials were handing one another
high-priced motor-cars as souvenirs and generals
of division were buying up palatial dwellings
at a rate which created a small boom in real
estate, the daily press of Mexico of only eighteen
months ago apathethically described the eating
WHY ARMENIA 165
alive by rats of women weakened by age and
children emaciated by hunger. It was a gruesome
news-item but nothing more.
But Mexicans have no corner on apathy. On
Sunday, March twentieth of this year, The New
York Telegram published two items cheek by jowl
in parallel columns. The first was headed "Mex-
ico to Prevent Flight of Jenkins," the other,
"Mexico Plans to Make Own Guns, Palmer Says."
The first item stated that the authorities at Puebla,
having discovered that W. 0. Jenkins, American
Consular Agent there, was planning to leave
secretly for the United States had taken meas-
ures to prevent this action. My comment on
that is that as our State Department held abso-
lute proof of the innocence of Jenkins and as in
the face of that proof the President insisted on
abandoning him, no blame can attach to the
Mexicans for adding insult to injury and piling
ordure on affront.
The gist of the second item is to the effect that
the Attorney General was of the opinion that while
exportation from the United States to Mexico of
166 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
arms and ammunition is now prohibited, exporta-
tion of machinery for the building of an armament
factory would not come under a fair construction of
these laws and therefore could not be prohibited.
He then shifted responsibility by pointing out that
under war powers President Wilson could bar
exportation of any article. In other words, we
have a national right to prevent our left leg from
being bitten by a mad dog, but only the Executive
has the authority to protect our right leg from the
same bite.
The result of the conditions existing not five
years ago but to-day in Mexico, and which I have
tried to outline so fairly that none but the hypo-
critical can take exception to my deductions, is a
wide-spread and continuing misery throughout the
lower classes and the more inaccessible regions of
Mexico that in frequently recurring periods of
famine equals anything we have heard of in
Armenia both as to the millions affected and the
scope of disaster. What would be your choice
between a swift death by massacre or the slow
torture of famine?
WHY ARMENIA 167
The peon is naturally improvident; in the face
of varying climatic conditions he can do no more
than hold his own. What would be penury to our
agricultural laboring class is to him affluence.
Strike at his narrow margin of a bare livelihood
by turbulent conditions added to the menace of
droughts and he is immediately plunged into
starvation. c>>V" yj^ 3 ^
If the reader has been patient enough to follow
4^gfv~ .V*~ -~~~ Sfc.
me thus far he will be able to understand why no
nation-wide appeal for money has ever been made
to Americans for relief in Mexico; he will also see
that no such fund could be applied to its legitimate
object. If he will follow me further I shall attempt
to show that the complications of the Mexican
situation demand from us a more difficult kind of
giving, a charity of thought, of understanding and
finally of action which makes a demand on our
patience and time, two commodities which we are
apt to value beyond cash.
In all such matters we have a national inclina-
tion to demand solution of the problem and let
the exposition take care of itself, but I refuse to be
168 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
drawn into the trap which has caught the feet of
the many know-it-alls who have wandered through
Mexico befogged by preconceived notions of
unattainable ideals and come out to do immeasur-
able damage by advocating impracticable ends
wholly divorced from the actualities which cry
aloud for a short peck of common sense.
If this book is an arraignment of the govern-
ment we put in power in Mexico and of our
disastrous share in the chaos existing in that coun-
try, for my own protection if for no higher reason it
should be made fool-proof and hog-tight before
being submitted as a basis for such radical action
as has never yet been applied in our foreign rela-
tions. In this connection there is a large division
of Americans which to-day is giving its entire
attention to minding its own business and which
can be expected to ask, "If we left them alone
for a hundred years, why not leave them alone for
another hundred?"
The answer to that is easy. Once we had no
stake in Mexico, to-day we have. Once Mexico
WHY ARMENIA] 169
was not a factor in the world's commerce, to-day
it_is. Once Mexico was a yapping cur, to-day it is
a knife held steadily at the back of our national
peace. Once Mexico invited investment and
offered security to life and property, to-day a
thousand major claims are gathering dust in the
archives of a somnolent and sterilized Department
of State.
You cannot go back on a billion dollars of
your neighbor's money without hearing the wail
of the holders of the bag, Tom, Dick and Harry,
morning, noon and night. You cannot ignore
robbery and foul play next door and look for a
square deal from the rest of the jeering world.
\You cannot overlook Mexico and put your hand
in your pocket for Armenia without proclaiming
yourself a fool.) You cannot submit to the murder
by a recognized friendly government of your own
flesh and blood at the rate of two a month for
thirty-six months without declaring a perpetual
open season for the potting of every American
who ventures abroad. When it comes right down
170 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
to hard tacks, you cannot bring up your boy to
put up with all or any of these things without
despising him and yourself in the long run of
national character-building.
CHAPTER VI
NEGOTIATION BY ULTIMATUM ONLY
ON MARCH 23, 1920, a new American Ambas-
sador to Mexico was appointed and the choice of
the administration was rightly commended by
the vast majority of the press. A New York
editprial T on the following day opened with these
words: "It is permissible for the friends of peace
and good neighborhood to hope that the appoint-
ment of Mr. Henry Morgenthau as Ambassador
to Mexico portends the reestablishment of rela-
tions of confidence and friendship with the
Government and the people of that Republic."
No exception whatever could be taken to the
President's selection; on the other hand it is by
no means permissible for the friends of peace and
good neighborhood to draw the pleasant auguries
pictured by this editorial. The mere appointment
of an ambassador to Mexico at the present junc-
ture is fraught with danger to the best interests of
the United States and was at once an unwarranted
171
172 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
concession to a government which had flouted all
our efforts toward friendly dealing and an imposi-
tion on Mr. Morgenthau himself whose exceptional
record and training should have saved him from
the threat of being stretched on the rack of the
Mexican post. Fortunately for him his appoint-
ment found the Senate in no mood to confirm any
envoy to Mexico. But that the attempt to send
one should have been made is a matter for alarm.
-J <-\AAL<V. xv^kt. < 3 *-- \t*&* ^*A.jl>l
The editorial quoted goes onto say that ne "will
be in a position to tell the Mexicans that there is
no reason on earth why the relations between their
country and the United States should not be those
of friendship, of frankness and fair dealing. Their
industries, their commerce, their credit, will be
immensely advantaged by good understanding,
and thus he will be able to point out to them that
friendly spirit which one neighbor should always
feel toward another."
This echo from the book of Rollo is a master-
piece of its kind. It might have been written b
. Aw^" W Ito
any journalist in a sound sleep. Take the state-
ment that there is no reason on earth why the
NEGOTIATION BY ULTIMATUM ONLY 173
relations between Mexico and this country should
not be those of friendship, of frankness and fair
dealing. What are the facts? Five hundred and
fifty-nine Americans murdered since the fall of
Diaz without reparation of any kind; American
property values destroyed in over one-third of the
states of the so-called Republic without indemnity;
between eight hundred and one thousand claims
mouldering in the files of our State Department
without hope of settlement; confiscatory inter-
pretation of the clauses of the new constitution
jeopardizing American vested interests to the tune
of hundreds of millions, arbitrary juggling of
national budgets to evade legitimate international
obligations and, most significant of all, a consis-
tent evasion of friendly or any other kind of nego-
tiation on all these points. In short, up to the
actual collapse of Carranza, we were in possession
of the entire credit side of the ledger and faced by
a debtor who, far from showing inclination to pay,
displayed a cynical aptitude for piling insult on
injury.
These are the rocks which must be removed
174 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
before the double stream of our relations with
Mexico can attain an even and peaceful flow.
But these specific obstacles are only half the story.
If they stood isolated from the fabric of the
machine which Carranza built up and which
threatens to prolong its activities beyond his
individual elimination, they could be attacked
one by one by an experienced diplomat with some
hope of their ultimate removal. Unfortunately they
are attached in an unholy union to the very vitals
of an organization which has sucked nutriment
from opposition to "friendship, frankness and
fair dealing" with the United States and, such
being the case, the appointment of an ambassador
was a move which should have been studied
seriously before it was given even qualified
approval.
There is nothing more maddening and at the
same time more unjust to those who represented
the United States in Mexico during the period
of our participation in the World War than the
implication that they were remiss in pressing
upon that country by every means in their power
NEGOTIATION BY ULTIMATUM ONLY 175
the advantages of a genuinely friendly relation-
ship. That they failed of their objective is due
entirely to the fact that while they had the
sympathy and support of the State Department,
the State Department was to all intents and
purposes cut off from the White House and con-
sequently powerless.
Owing to recent developments which are in
the knowledge of the public, it is permissible to
call attention to an important feature of our
recent official relations with Mexico, and that is,
that we had not a presidential dictatorship using
the State Department as a tool but an absolute
hiatus between the machinery of our foreign rela-
tions and the Executive. The plant was in fairly
good running order but the connecting rod linking
it to the source of power was more than twisted;
it was discarded.
During the entire three years of Mr. Fletcher's
embassy to Mexico he was granted but a single
interview with the President on Mexican affairs
and that conversation was devoted to securing
release of ammunition to Mexico in the spring of
176 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
1917. For the rest of the time, the Ambassador
occupied the anomalous position of being on paper
the personal representative of the President, but
in fact nothing more than the voluminous infor-
mant of a State Department, which in turn could
do no more than supply a tomb for a mass of
occurrences and deductions which should have
formed the basis for an active and comprehensive
policy. Throughout this period the only intima-
tion, the only suggestion of a move toward a
definite line of action in regard to Mexico, was a
circular instruction to diplomatic and consular
officers to "shower benefits on Mexico." This
initiative was ascribed in plain terms to the Pres-
ident but carried no intimation that it was founded
on any but abstract considerations.
Whatever their personal views may have been
as to the wisdom of such a move, this faint stirring
of interest in Mexican relations was seized upon
by the representatives of the United States with
avidity and given whole-hearted execution. In
the face of one rebuff after another in both the
diplomatic and strictly commercial fields of our
NEGOTIATION BY ULTIMATUM ONLY 177
international contact, our officers presented a
steadily smiling front until a point was reached
where they could no longer countenance thievery
of the Mexicans by Mexicans on the one hand
and murder of Americans on the other without
surrendering forever their individual self-respect.
Thievery and murder are strong words, but
none too strong to describe an issue which forces
senior officers across the broad limit which divides
the official as such from the individual man. I
mean by that, that a representative of any govern-
ment is technically a hand of that government
extended abroad and taking its direction from the
central will. Technically he is that and nothing
more, but once in a while a condition arises where
the mechanical hand becomes human, where the
personal equation gradually asserts itself over the
machinery of cut and dried instructions and the
individual awakes to the fact that he himself can
go no further along the line marked out by his
government without becoming vile in his own
eyes. To his country such a development is
seldom a matter of importance, but to the self-
178 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
respecting individual it is an intimate climax;
he is face to face with the necessity of surrendering
either his manhood or his official status.
Such a condition came to a head in Mexico at
about the time of the armistice. It arose from a
long accumulation of incidents but one alone will
be sufficient to enable you to apply a test and ask
yourself, "What would I have done if it had been
up to me?"
Do you remember when you were going without
sugar for your second cup of coffee and had mighty
little for your first? Do you remember when your
wife was trying desperately to substitute inge-
nuity for white flour and getting away with it at
the expense of your digestion?- During all that
time there never was a day when the adherents
of the Carranza machine lacked their fill of sugar
and white flour. Simultaneously tremendous
pressure was brought to bear on the American
Consulate General to facilitate the entry of
American corn to save the common people of
Mexico from actual starvation.
On the face of things there was a paradox and
NEGOTIATION BY ULTIMATUM ONLY 179
a paradox actually existed. A telegraphic investi-
gation made under instruction from our Depart-
ment of State revealed the fact that eighty per
cent, of Mexico and the Mexicans was threatened
with imminent famine. Great planters whose
sympathies were by no means with us in the
crucial question of the war, lowered their pride,
changed their avowals of adherence and presented
themselves with tears running down their cheeks
to beg for the chance to buy corn to feed their
starving peon retainers. As a result concessions
in the way of export of corn were made to Mexico
such as we granted to no other neutral country,
however friendly or however urgent its needs.
At the same time, the millers of Mexico sub-
mitted a volume of circumstantial evidence to the
effect that if we did not release a certain amount
of wheat, white bread would disappear from the
Mexican table. They exhibited statistics on
existing stocks, on the rate of consumption and on
the sufferings which would result to the entire
middle class from our refusal to come to their aid.
This appeal failed. Why? Because individually
180 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
I never laid in a stock of over ten pounds of flour
and the frequent purchases of my cook in the
open market supplied a small-sized but practical
barometer which refuted the exaggerated state-
ments of the millers. Nevertheless, there was a
wide-spread popular belief that the country was
on the verge of a bread famine which would
supplement the lack of corn and thus plunge all
classes of the Mexican family into the same
hungry boat.
However, soon after the Consulate General had
refused to lend its aid to this project, the unfore-
seen accumulation of flour stocks in the United
States permitted the release of fifty million
pounds to Mexico and a conference of all our
consular officers in that country was called to
arrange an equitable distribution of the shipments.
Within forty-eight hours it was rumored that
the millers had started a movement to persuade
the acting Secretary of the Mexican Treasury to
place an import duty on wheat flour. Apparently
the famine arguments they had put forward when
NEGOTIATION BY ULTIMATUM ONLY 181
pressing their demands for whole wheat did not
apply to the ground grain.
The proposition for an import duty on flour
seemed too preposterous for credence. The papers
had hailed the large release of flour by the United
States with hearty commendation and merchants
were swarming at the Consulate General to secure
their quotas at the earliest possible moment.
Everybody knew the venal character of the
Mexican Treasury Department, but importers felt
that in this case at least public opinion would form
an effective barrier to any tariff juggling which
might start an echo in the empty national stomach.
The feasibility of tariff juggling (under an extra-
ordinary bit of legislation the dangers of which
have been ignored here and scarcely appreciated
in Mexico) remained as the only justification for
the persistent rumors that continued to reach
the Consulate General to the effect that an im-
port duty would surely be put on flour before
the shipments from the United States could arrive
and that the method of persuasion by the millers
would be the ancient medium of hard cash.
\
182 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
Within a week our secret service, at that time
still active in Mexico, secured a copy of a telegram
sent by the millers in Mexico City to the millers
in Guadalajara which, being translated, ran as
follows: "N. asks 150,000 pesos to put duty on
flour. Will you stand your share?" It is natur-
ally impossible to cite the persons who reported
by word of mouth and day by day the actual
negotiations which ended (as predicted by the
informants from the rise of the first rumor) in an
import duty conceded for a cash price.
This incident stands out as easily the most
cynical example of the Carranza graft machine in
full action. On its shameless face it was at once a
crime against the Mexican people and an affront
to the United States. It was because it was an
affront to the United States and a barrier to the
wave of good feeling arising from our action in
releasing the flour that Carranza could afford to
stand for it.
American merchants, accustomed to doing
business on a fixed tariff and who know from their
experiences during periods of tariff revision the
NEGOTIATION BY ULTIMATUM ONLY 183
basic relation between import trade and estab-
lished import duties, are apt to doubt the imposi-
tion of an import duty on a prime necessity of life
in any country by executive decree. Let me call
the attention of such doubters to the parenthesis
inserted three paragraphs above which made a
passing allusion to a choice bit of Carranza
legislation and stated that its dangers have been
ignored in the United States and scarcely appre-
ciated in Mexico.
That allusion referred to the powers granted
to the Mexican Executive by a subservient legis-
lature and which he held for a term of years (and
still holds) to change the import tariffs of the
country on such articles and for such periods and
purposes as he saw fit by executive decree un-
supported by any legislative debate or specific
authorization. Of all the implements of com-
mercial torture, this is the most perfected quick-
graft producer known to the history of interna-
tional trade.
What does it mean? It means that no man can
carry on a successful business in Mexico while this
184 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
provision continues without dirtying his hands
with bribery. Unless you are a merchant you can-
not weigh that statement without an illustration.
Imagine that you are an importer and that the
President has the power to change the tariff on
twenty-four hours' notice or even make the change
retroactive. Imagine further that five out of any
ten'cabinet officers have personal go-betweens who
are known to all and sundry as fixed avenues of
approach. Suppose that you have a large ship-
ment of raw material on the way to meet con-
tractural obligations. You immediately become
the prey of any one who hears of that shipment,
and at the first rumor of a duty to be suddenly
imposed on the raw material in question, you are
faced with this alternative: "Sweat blood or pay."
That is one angle of the picture; here is another.
Your stocks are low, prices are high, salesmen are
pressing you to buy and import. You can see a
big profit, your mouth waters, but that is as far
as you get. Why? It takes from two to ten
months to secure delivery of goods from abroad
and unless you stand in you cannot possibly know
NEGOTIATION BY ULTIMATUM ONLY 185
what will be the duty on any given article a week
ahead. For general trade purposes it takes not
only money but a genius for intrigue and under-
ground alliances to "stand in," and few there be
that measure up (or down) to the requirements.
The average merchant is reduced to ordering one-
tenth of what he would like to buy and distribut-
ing his purchases so as to insure himself of a
chance to balance loss here against profit there.
Thieves only win; consumers lose.
After seventeen years' experience in the com-
mercial service of the United States I make the
assertion that were all other grounds for friction
with Mexico miraculously wiped off the slate
this single item of the arbitrary power of the
executive branch of the Mexican government to
juggle import tariffs at will is so iniquitous in its
endless ramifications that while it stands we are
foolish to waste money on an ambassador to that
country. If you will think you will see that this
language is not extravagant. For generations
tariff stipulations have been woven into the warp
and woof of international comity. The Mexican
186 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
tariff situation is a quicksand. Quite aside from
its aspect of wide-spread blackmail it is capable
of swallowing whole any doll's house lodging for a
non-existent "friendship, frankness and fair
dealing" which we may attempt to build on its
unstable borders.
However, the significance of the attempts to
send an ambassador to Mexico does not hang on
the issue of the tariff. While the danger of the
situation on that issue to legitimate commerce
was fully reported to the State Department, it is
doubtful whether any official higher than a
filing clerk has taken this menace to stabilized
relations into consideration or even heard of it.
The true measure of the action frustrated first by
the United States Senate and then by the turn of
events in Mexico can be taken only by painting
in broad strokes the map of events which swept
a Secretary of State, an Ambassador and lesser
officials who were saturated with knowledge of
conditions in Mexico off the board and substituted
for them gentlemen who are popularly credited
with a willingness to follow a blind lead.
NEGOTIATION BY ULTIMATUM ONLY 187
^A fair deduction from these events appeared in
The New York World of March 24, 1920, which
read in part as follows: "The President's appoint-
ment of a successor to Ambassador Fletcher is
his answer to the activities of the Senate Sub-
Committee investigating Mexican affairs which
has been presided over by Senator Fall of New
Mexico. It is, moreover, his reply to the cam-
paign, which had obtained sympathetic considera-
tion inside the Department of State to withdraw
recognition from the Carranza Government by
resolution of Congress.
"It is true that Secretary Lansing, although
the original proponent of recognition of Carranza,
had got more or less out of patience with the
actions of the Mexican Government in various
disputes pending with the United States, and
that Ambassador Fletcher, too, felt that all that
could be done with dignity and honor had been
attempted by the American Embassy at Mexico
City to no avail."
This is a mild statement of the true facts in the
case. In the first place, while there had undoubt-
188 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
edly been a strong campaign on the part of various
organizations for the protection of American
rights in Mexico to move the State Department
to any policy, good or bad, so long as it was a
fixed quantity and not the eternally unknown X,
this legitimate activity met with minimum results.
Why? Because the State Department was in
mortal terror of the mere appearance of consorting
with "big interests" at a time when dollar dip-
lomacy was out of fashion. What really influenced
the senior branch of our administrative machinery
to cut its own throat by the mere act of coming
to life for a brief moment wasi the sudden realiza-
tion that itj preferred a quick exit to a creeping
death.
It was being eaten alive not by clamorous
claims from without but by the remorseless piling
up of fact on fact from within. It knew what no
one else knew about Mexico, not excepting the
most rabid propagandists. It could not pass that
knowledge on to the public, but what was far more
fatal it could not even pass it up to the normal
source of its own power. Robbed of that con-
NEGOTIATION BY ULTIMATUM ONLY 189
stitutional vent it was being rapidly choked to
death by its automatic accumulation of stark
truths which would not be denied, "big interests"
or no "big interests." Aware at last that its
machinery was slowing down under the burden
to complete stoppage it emitted one single valiant
shout against the rape of its faithful servant,
Jenkins, and passed away.
It is not the purpose of this book to mystify
the reader on any particular nor to arouse the
instincts of prejudiced partisanship. We are
interested here merely in making clear the obscure.
Consequently you have a right to know just what
it was that clogged the wheels of the State Depart-
ment. It had been almost feverish in its efforts
through its representatives to carry out the order
to "shower benefits on Mexico." These efforts
were shattered without an exception against a
blank wall and that blank wall was the unqualified
refusal of Mexico to have benefits showered on her
at any price. Imagine a chess-board where one
side makes a succession of opening moves through
three patient years and its opponent merely blinks
190 , IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
and never advances a single pawn. There you
have a picture of our diplomatic relations with
Mexico throughout the Carranza ascendancy.
From the point of view of economic welfare
the stand taken by Carranza brought untold and
unnecessary suffering on his nation as a whole,
but from the view-point of abstract diplomacy his
position was absolutely unassailable. We had a
baker's dozen of paramount claims against
Mexico; she had none against us. We had an-
nounced that no matter what she did we would
never resort to force. As a consequence she left
all her diplomatic chessmen standing quite still
and behind that screen began to pile one affront
on another protected by nothing whatever beyond
President Wilson's assurance that we had tied our
own hands and given our executive word that we
would keep them tied.
Can you see the position of the State Depart-
ment? As incident was added to incident, increas-
ing the heap of unsettled claims almost day by
day with never a settlement of a single outstand-
ing question, it realized that to all intents it had
NEGOTIATION BY ULTIMATUM ONLY 191
actually ceased to function. It was not moved
to take thought by arguments of its representatives
but by cold facts, ten cabled words telling of a
fresh murder, fifty describing a confiscation, two
hundred outlining a disastrous law, half a dozen
messages covering decrees each one of which was
a robbery on a grand scale.
It took thought and realized what every school-
boy knows, that you can tie one hand behind
your back and still get along if you are clever and
husky. But with two hands tied behind your
back, you have not evened things to the level of
the weakest member of your social community;
you have gone further and simply made yourself
the easy prey of the smallest urchin mean enough
to spit in your face. This question of meanness
is the canker at the heart of our altruism toward
Mexico. The Mexican has never known the sensa-
tion of chivalry; it has never occurred to him to
spare a fallen foe. The mere fact of a man's
having his hands tied appears to him the most
reasonable argument for slapping his face. "What
better chance could you possibly get?" he asks,
192 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
and stands absolutely bewildered by the conten-
tion that our self-made impotence is a thing to
be respected. Probably the most surprised man
in Mexico to-day is Herrera, on trial for murdering
Carranza in his sleep.
Having had this truth thoroughly drummed
into it the State Department finally realized that
there is only one path back to safe and sane rela-
tions with Mexico. It saw in the Constitutionalist
government's growth a noxious plant that had
grown A to unprecedented proportions because it
was being watered by an unprecedented forbear-
ance on our part, a plant fertilized by the bodies of
hundreds of murdered Americans and sustained by
robbery of thousands of others. There was but
one recourse from the view-point of common sense
and mercy as well as from that of legitimate
protection to Americans abroad, and it consisted
in an abrupt withdrawal of the forbearance which
had caused the mischief, a reversal to negotiation
by ultimatum only.
Let me quote further from the article from The
New Yor\ World cited before. After remarking
NEGOTIATION BY ULTIMATUM ONLY 193
that when the World War ended the President was
too absorbed in other matters to bother about
Mexico, it proceeds: "As a consequence matters
drifted on until the Senate Sub-Committee took
an active interest in the situation, seeking by
publicity not exactly to bring about intervention,
as so many people have supposed, but to obtain a
withdrawal of the recognition the United States
had extended to the Carranza Government. Even
if the plan failed, it was thought the moral in-
fluence of the investigation would promote a
healthier regard for the lives and properties of
American citizens, especially in the vexatious oil
controversy.
"There is some reason to believe that both
Secretary Lansing and Ambassador Fletcher were
so ready to cooperate with the Senate Committee
as to give the impression that they believed their
own hand in diplomacy would be strengthened
thereby in dealing directly with the Carranza
Government. But President Wilson upset all
plans. Not only did he decline to countenance
any cooperation between Secretary Lansing and
194 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
the Senate Committee looking toward a with-
drawal of recognition and, incidentally, considered
the Jenkins case a rather flimsy pretext for inter-
national strife, but he accepted Ambassador
Fletcher's resignation without so much as a word
of appreciation for the many and trying months
he had spent in wrestling with the Mexican situa-
tion both in Mexico City and Washington."
Those two paragraphs are exceedingly interest-
ing. In the first place they are accurate; in the
second they show how mild was the initial step by
which the State Department hoped to force the
Mexican government into advancing a single pawn
on the chess-board of international friendship.
It purposed merely to withdraw recognition
of Carranza. It is amusing to compare the im-
portance we attach to this recognition with the
reception it got at Carranza's hands at the time of
its occurrence. By giving it out to the press as a
minor news item with no comment whatever he
used it to emphasize his isolation from the United
States and subsequently consigned it to the
lumber-room of national rubbish.
NEGOTIATION BY ULTIMATUM ONLY 195
Does this mean that if we actually did with-
draw recognition such action would not affect the
standing of Mexico's executive? Not at all; it
means merely that the Constitutionalist machine
has been playing and still triumphantly plays its
game of bluff with mechanical consistency and
will continue to play it until it sees the shadow cast
before of a genuine ultimatum, be its nature what
it may. At long last the State Department awoke
to the absurdity of its monologue behind a dust-
covered diplomatic chess-board while its opponent
was engaged in grim poker. It knew that any-
thing in the line of an ultimatum that meant what
it said would serve to call the bluff and it evolved
the meek and purely negative recourse of with-
drawing its previous recognition.
Ask yourself in all fairness if this move savored
of intervention. It did not, but it did contain the
seed of action. It marked the turning point where
the Department was willing to avow to the world
that it had gone its limit along the road of "let
her slide" and was ready to drop the parrot call
to Mexico of, "Whatever you do, we won't do
1% IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
anything," and substitute for it a sequence of
pregnant phrases beginning, "If you don't do
so-and-so in forty-eight hours, we will do so-and-
so."
Let me interject an incident in support of the
assertion that anything in the line of an ultimatum
would have served^to check the unbridled assault
of the Mexican^administration on fundamental
rights of Americans within its territories. In
August of last year a five-line despatch slipped into
the papers to the effect that the United States was
about to reverse its "policy" toward Mexico.
This announcement caused no surprise in the
United States and had been actually expectedln
Mexico since the signing of the armistice. So
inevitable and so reasonable had it appeared to
officials of every category that they had been
indulging in a last orgy of petty affronts under the
old status of "hands off." Now it is a matter of
fact that within forty-eight hours of the publica-
tion of this small news item two cabinet officers
and three other individuals prominent in the
Carranza ranks got in touch with an American
NEGOTIATION BY ULTIMATUM ONLY 197
who had had intimate relations with his Embassy
and Consulate General to learn when and how the
crash was to arrive. The burden of their nervous
cry was that they had long "seen it coming" and
wanted inside seats on the new band-wagon.
If ever there was a moment when the Carranza
regime was open to reasonable negotiations it was
while this mere rumor of a change in American
tactics was in the air. A quiver of the inter-
national weather-vane Was enough to start the
bandit government scrambling, but before the echo
of the disturbance could reach Washington the
State Department was forced to announce that
the declaration of a change of "policy" toward
Mexico was erroneous and that no reversal was
contemplated. Immediately the smile reappeared
on the face of the Mexican tiger. He was dazed
by this bit of incredible luck but promptly and
philosophically returned to the carcass. The end
of the free lunch on American lives and property
was not yet; so much to the good.
This incident stands out like a shining light in
support of those American officials who asserted
198 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
time and again that a firm hand laid on Mexico
would have led to peace and not to war, and inci-
dentally would have saved what was good in
Carranza to the service of his country. It answers
the lollipop pacifists who have endeavored to
establish as an axiom the principle of total blind-
ness as a requisite to leadership and lays at their
door, where it belongs, the blame for passively
sinking us deeper and deeper in a mire of our own
creation. It thunders in ears which will not hear
the truth that by nature, training and precedent
the Mexican despises forbearance but bows to
pressure.
Now get a picture clearly in your mind. At
the beginning of this current year the position of
the State Department suddenly crystallized, pre-
cipitated by the Jenkins outrage. The conviction
that under the slogan of "No more shilly-shally-
ing!" we might yet save the day for a settle-
ment of the Mexican embroglio without inter-
vention soaked up gradually from its source in
the heart of every American official on the spot,
bar none, until it saturated the entire Department
NEGOTIATION BY ULTIMATUM ONLY 199
and reached an arbitrary limit in the Secretary
of State. Beyond him it could not go for reasons
already stated. But its long labor was not entirely
lost, for it served to bring Mexican affairs, as an
issue, squarely on the administrative carpet.
Here is the picture. The Department through
its action in the Jenkins case said to the public,
"We who are about to die salute you. It is our
opinion that no ambassador should be sent into the
berserk land of Mexico and that furthermore we
should withdraw our recognition of one who has
steadfastly held aloof from even a bowing ac-
quaintance. We believe that this pressure, stead-
ily increased, will point the way to a settlement
with peace and that any other road will lead us
farther into the dark forest of misunderstanding.
We confess past error and declare for negotiation
by ultimatum only rather than no negotiation at
all. Incidentally, squeezed between a rising bed
of thorns and the smothering blanket of a deaf
ear, we stand or fall by the cardinal issue that the
Department of State is an essential branch of the
mechanism of government physically incapable of
200 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
functioning under administration by blind pre-
conception from above when it is being choked by
contrary facts from within."
Thus having declared itself the Department
fell and it fell hard. With the dismissal of the
Secretary and the elimination of Fletcher, it was
swept bare of the last major official conversant
with the actual Mexican situation; with the ap-
pointment of a new ambassador, categorical an-
swer was given to Lansing's swan-song regardless
of the new surrender to Carranza and the fresh
betrayal of American lives which it necessarily
entailed; with the assertion of the doctrine of no
advice from advisers the executive chariot wheels
plunged one revolution farther into the sea of
mud which is non-existent by presidential decree,
but which continues to befoul our southern
border just the same.
The facts are now before the reader but there is
one crucial point on which he can be given no
information and that is, what was the intention,
good or bad, behind the appointment of a fresh
ambassador? Was there any plan, sane or insane,
NEGOTIATION BY ULTIMATUM ONLY 201
for a constructive policy toward Mexico to sup-
plant the scheme evolved under Mr. Lansing?
If there was no plan and if no adequate settle-
ment was aimed at or intended the position of any
one accepting the Mexican post with open eyes,
irrespective of individuality, would be ambiguous
and unenviable. If he acquiesced knowingly to
the posture of a brass-monkey which was forced
on unwilling predecessors he would lay himself
open to a charge of time-serving complacency.
If he surrendered what shreds of dignity we have
left by being the medium through which it is
suggested to Mexico, under whatever control,
that we wipe out all scores and start afresh, the
scores being totally on our side of the slate, he
would become an active partner in the infamy of
a great betrayal. There is no middle ground
in a game where your opponents never emerge
from behind their own goal line.
How far that betrayal has already gone is
measured by the milestones of five hundred and
sixty-one murdered Americans, two victims hav-
ing been added to the list since this chapter was
202 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
begun. In regard to no single one of these cases
have we taken any action whatever beyond
stereotyped notes. Compare that inactivity on
our part with the astonishing sworn testimony
of Judge E. L. Medler, before whom six of the Co-
lumbus raiders were tried for murder, convicted and
sentenced to be hung. The evidence was given
before the Senate Sub-Committee for the investi-
gation of Mexican affairs in February of this year.
Judge Medler. He (Mr. Stone) produced a
telegram from the Attorney General.
Senator Fall. The Attorney General of the
United States?
Judge Medler. The Attorney General of the
United States; containing these instructions,
which I read. He also produced a telegram from
General Funston, who was then in charge of the
Southern Department, in San Antonio, and also
produced a telegram from the Secretary of War,
or the Secretary of State I cannot remember
which it is my present recollection it was from
the Secretary of State, but I would not be positive
NEGOTIATION BY ULTIMATUM ONLY 203
as to this. The substance of these telegrams was
that these various departments protested against
the trial of the Villa raiders, or Columbus raiders,
as we called them, on the ground that it would
involve the United States in international com-
plications with Mexico.
Senator Fall. These telegrams were submitted
to you?
Judge Medler. They were submitted to me in
open court.
Senator Fall. What was your decision?
Judge Medler. I told Mr. Stone that these
defendants were regularly indicted by a properly
impaneled grand jury of Luna County; that they
were in charge of the sheriff of Luna County;
that the grand jury had previously reported that
the jail of Luna County was insanitary and not a
proper place to confine prisoners; and that to
continue the trial of this case would involve their
being held in jail for six months, and I saw no
reason why the court could not proceed to try this
case on the following morning; that General Per-
shing was in Mexico with his expedition trying to
204 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
arrest Francisco Villa, a co-defendant named in
this indictment; and that if the trial of these raiders
would involve the United States in international
complications, to my mind it would seem that
the United States was already involved. In
other words, I practically told him there would
be no "watchful waiting" around my court or any
of my courts. I think that was the substance of
the language I used.
Ask your heart whether it stands with this
Texas judge or with the various departments that
were feverishly active in their attempts to save six
invaders of our own soil but have never been
allowed to lift a finger for the protection of
Americans across the line; and while you are ask-
ing that question remember that when we were
engaged in the World War and at a time when the
fate of this nation and its Allies depended largely
on a supply of fuel oil, there was a larger percentage
of Americans murdered in the Mexican oil fields
than was fatted in the trenches of Europe.
In paraphrasing above the valedictory of the
NEGOTIATION BY ULTIMATUM ONLY 205
State Department as an integral part of our ma-
chinery of government there is no intention of
ridicule. I was a member of its official family
under John, Hay, Root, Bacon, Knox, Bryan and
Lansing and from that intimacy can testify to its
one-time peculiar atmosphere of dignity, patience,
power and almost parental guidance, but if you
will take Hay's tenure of office as marking the
apex of the Department's influence abroad, Root's
as the high-water mark of internal reform, and
cast up accounts against the chaos that was Bryan
and the long inglory that was Lansing you will
perceive a distinct recovery from ignominy in the
final gesture of Captain Lansing as he went down
with his sinking ship.
Because it was done apparently by request we
are apt to lose sight of the significance of his act
of official suicide. Remember that whatever the
conjunction of causes which brought it about,
those causes came to a final issue on a unanimous
conviction within the Department itself that the
only way to peace with Mexico without dishonor
is the path of negotiation by ultimatum only.
206 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
If that policy was the best way out of the mess
of Mexico in nominal control of a central power
it will apply fourfold to Mexico in the throes of
civil strife or under a fresh dictatorial rule.
CHAPTER VII
THE ONLY WAY 7
WITH the death of Carranza, there is bound to be
in this country a rejuvenation of misguided toler-
ance. Already one hears talk on all sides of the
propriety of patience while the latest leader of
the Mexicans proves himself; editorials appear
from day to day directing attention to Mexican
affairs as being in a state of transition and coun-
seling a policy of observation. Few seem to
realize that it is far more important to the peace
of this hemisphere that we should made demands
for constructive activity in Washington just now
rather than for a miracle in Mexico.
What does that statement mean? It means
that if we had a carefully constructed policy to-
ward Mexico and followed it consistently, there
would be no Mexican problem. There is one I
sense in which we are criminally responsible for
every disturbance in Mexico and it can be summed \
207
208 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
up in the general accusation that we are looking
the wrong way. Our whole attitude is and has
been one of facing toward Mexico when we ought
to face toward Washington. If we demand the
right thing of our own government and get it,
evolve a policy and follow it steadfastly, we need
never worry about what is happening across the
border, because what happens across the border
has for a hundred years been an inverted reflection
V O f the attitude of Washington.
I have yet to meet an educated Mexican or an
American with experience in Mexico who does not
admit that the plan outlined in the following pages
is the only way toward a permanent cure. It will
prove comprehensible, however, only to those who
are willing to stand with their backs toward the
din in Mexico and contemplate the stagnant
inaction of Washington in the face of a great and
humane opportunity. Why watch Mexico's
sixty-fourth experiment founded on exactly the
same ingredients that made up its predecessors?
Why insist upon being told the same answer sixty-
four times? Why not try one constructive exper-
THE ONLY WAY 209
iment of our own, a sensible one with a fair chance
of astounding success?
Do you think Mexico has changed because
Diaz fell or because the individual, Carranza, has
now gone by the board? Listen. On August thir-
teenth, just forty-two years ago, Mr. Evarts, Sec-
retary of State, addressed an instruction to John
W. Foster, then American Minister to Mexico, in
which the following passage occurs: "The first
duty of a government is to protect life and property.
This is a paramount obligation. For this govern-
ments are instituted, and governments neglecting or
failing to perform it become worse than useless.
This duty the government of the United States has
determined to perform to the extent of its power
toward its citizens on the border. It is not solicitous,
it never has been, about the methods or ways in which
that protection shall be accomplished, whether by
formal treaty stipulation or by informal convention;
whether by the action of judicial tribunals or that
of military forces. Protection in fact to American
lives and property is the sole point upon which the
United States are tenacious."
210 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
Compare the dignity and force of this utter-
ance with the disastrous benevolence of the hun-
dred and one devitalized protests addressed to the
Mexican government during the Wilson adminis-
tration. Ask yourself frankly if the paramount
obligations of government have in truth become
obsolete during the last half century and whether
you prefer costly experiments in altruism to
"protection in fact" of American lives and prop-
erty.
Did Mr. Evarts* communication lead to war?
It did not. There is a very human story originat-
ing with the son of Diaz as to the effect produced
on his father at the first reading of a copy of this
informal note. He says that the President suf-
fered a "corq/e," an ailment unknown to Anglo-
Saxon pathology but common among Latins and
which can best be described as a fit of anger so
intense that there are cases where it has brought
sudden death to its victims. It should not be
confused with apoplexy as its one source is un-
bridled rage.
The story continues that when Diaz recovered
THE ONLY WAY 211
from his outburst of passion he entered a period of
calm consideration from which he emerged smiling,
struck the offending paper a crackling blow and
exclaimed, "El Fantasmal With this I will
muzzle my insubordinate generals. With this I
can persuade them that the United States means
business; they will either carry out my orders or
fight the United States." That day marked the
beginning of twenty-five years of peace not only
along the troubled border but throughout Mex-
ico.
To comprehend the full meaning of this inci-
dent it is necessary to recall the long epoch during
which El Fantasma, the Spectre, was a common
phrase used throughout Spanish America to
denote the United States and its supposed pred-
atory ambitions. Diaz himself did not believe
in the phantom menace but Jie was quick to seize
upon what was apparently the first concrete
evidence of its existence outside the bounds of
popular fancy and employ it as a tool with which
to control his unruly generals.
Looking back on that quarter of a century of
212 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
internal and external order the most prejudiced
American should be able to read the writing on the
wall. Mexico, led by Obregon or any other,
needs no revival of the Diaz r6gime because,
whatever its great benefits, in point of fact
it was a hierarchy built on the restless founda-
tion of social inequality; but she does need a re-
vival of that fear of the Spectre which by raising
a ghostly finger made possible her pacification
from border to border and from sea to sea. If
history of our contact with Mexico teaches one
lesson above another it is that in the very name
of peace we should plead as a matter of form and
threaten as a matter of business.
If this tenet implies brutality, let pacifists make
the most of it. To me, and I trust to the reader,
it is founded on logical deductions and can be
reduced to the terms of an appeal to reason in the
face of each eventually as it arises as opposed to a
nebular altruism aimed at factors supposed to
enter into the Mexican composition but which
exist only in the stillborn hallucination of the
minds that think inaction a synonym for peace.
THE ONLY WAY 213
As usual, events have been moving fast in
Mexico as this book goes to press, but too much
emphasis cannot be placed on the assertion made
in its early pages that there exists in that country a
permanent condition of unrest. Were it not for this
static feature, running like an unchanging kit
motif through the syncopated din of a century of
revolutions and counterrevolutions, this argu-
ment and its conclusions would fall to the ground
with the collapse of Carranza and prove of tran-
sitory value to all but students of political records.
As the facts stand, however, the present crisis in
Mexico merely adds strength to all that has been
and will be said.
This arraignment of a century of misgovern-
ment aims at no temporary amelioration of our
relations with Mexico. It is opposed to com-
promise with any new link in the long chain of
oligarchies which has held that country in bondage
unless such compromise carries with it a factor of
control, a principle of enduring stabilization.
Individually my blood boils at the needless mas-
sacre of Americans and American traditions under
214 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
the Wilson illusion, but in my capacity as the
interpreter of a condition I am bound to admit
an unforeseen value in the results of the President's
persistent apathy.
That value lies in the very extremes to which
abandonment of our interests has been carried.
At the President's dictation we bowed not only to
a long list of specific outrages; we went further.
We were put in the position of voluntarily dis-
carding all the machinery adjusted throughout
the history of the United States toward safe-
guarding international comity. The result is a
wipe-out of established precedent and leaves us
face to face with an opportunity never before
equaled for resuming complete relations with
Mexico on a new basis.
This point cannot be pressed home too strongly
because if there is one danger which threatens
above all others a permanent solution of the diffi-
culties between the two countries, it can be found
in our national tolerance toward weaker peoples,
in our disposition to let the bygones of the past be
bygones of the future and in our inclination to put
THE ONLY WAY 215
off trouble until to-morrow even if we are con-
vinced that it must grow with each day's delay.
With Carranza superseded by a fresh nominal head
of the government of Mexico ostensibly friendly to
the United States, what will be the tendency in
this country? To call it quits.
I assert that that is a danger, the danger of an
alleviation substituted for a settlement. It would
be to erect a temporary shack as a successor to the
old building which the Wilson administration in
the role of wrecker succeeded in completely
leveling. We would be giving only half-service
to our own immediate interests and the right to
our heirs to look back from a black day in the
future and say, "In 1920 you had all the strings
of this puzzle at your fingers' ends; you could
have settled it with a turn of the hand." Why not
build solidly now for our own as well as future
generations, for our own comfort and profit as
well as for the well-being of Mexicans high and
low?
How can this be done? Let us review the sit-
uation. On one side of the account Mexico owes
216 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
us reparation for five hundred and sixty-four
murdered Americans (three more having been
added to the list since Chapter VI of this book was
written); settlement of approximately one thou-
sand claims on file with the Department of
State; a portion of her foreign obligations under
the heading of loans and interest payments
passed; and reversal of her policy of confisca-
tion. On the other side of the ledger we owe her
nothing beyond the fact that through their own
ignorance many of her subjects residing in this
country were caught by the draft
This is merely the account current made up of
specific items which, if Mexico should attain
ability to pay, could be settled with any respons-
ible head of her government. But there is another
account of far greater importance which may be
classed under the head of funds on deposit. What
are the items that enter into it? Read them care-
fully. The future of legitimate interests; assured
protection of life and property not only of foreign-
ers but also of Mexicans; freedom of commerce
from the stains of bribery, and blackmail; the
THE ONLY WAY ,217
right of way for trade over banditry; a reasonable
average of justice in the national courts; prompt
suppression of disorder; liquidation of foreign
indebtedness, reestablishment of good faith as the
basis of interrelations and actual religious free-
dom.
Does the settlement of this account look like
a large order, incredible of fulfillment? It is
attainable to us to-day by a reversal of every half-
baked new doctrine infused into the Mexican
embroglio by Wilson's administration. There
is something distinctly ironical in that statement
taken in conjunction with the list of benefits to be
obtained, because the list I have given covers every
goal aimed at so blindly by the "policies" of Watchful
waiting, hands off, no protection to nationals
abroad, self-determination and salvation from within.
In other words, pacifists and all those who have
believed in the President's "stand" in regard to
Mexico 05 a means to an end have been running
away from the objects of their expressed desire.
We are now prepared to consider our problem
reduced to final terms with a view to solution
1 218 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
through the establishment of a fixed and reason-
able policy. What are the needs of Mexico? By
grace of the bare fact that she has been unable to
borrow abroad since the fall of Huerta her finances
in the face of her resources are in excellent condi-
tion. She requires only $350,000,000 to put her
square with the world. What she needs more than
money, however, is the assurance that it will be
well and legitimately spent, which requisition
carries with it as a corollary the stability of elected
government secured from without since it cannot
be from within.
In return, what are our requirements of
Mexico? Indemnity for murders of Americans
and property losses; restitution of vested rights;
expropriation by cash payments in lieu of worth-
less bonds for lands confiscated; security of chan-
nels of trade; the freeing of commerce from the
> shackles of tariff changes by presidential decree;
suppression of banditry; liquidation of foreign
obligations.
There are obstacles to the simultaneous attain-
ment of these two programmes, but they are by
THE ONLY WAY 219
no means insurmountable. On the Mexican side,
personal profit to whoever happens to be in
control will rule the day; on the American,
national apathy and an impatient impulse to be
quit of a troublesome issue by postponement may
easily ruin our chance for a permanent adjustment
of every item enumerated above; but in that
event let the administration responsible beware of
the consequences. The obstacle of personal profit
on the Mexican side is misnamed; it is an advan-
tage, a fulcrum we should be swift to employ by
making it distinctly unprofitable for any individ-
ual aspiring to the Mexican presidency to stand
in the way of genuine reform or be the stumbling-
block to tangible progress as opposed to illusory,
endlessly repeated promises to be good.
How is this end to be attained? By substitut-
ing for the inanition of "watchful waiting," the
policy of assertion; by replacing the passivity of
"hands off" with a policy of graduated pressure;
by admitting before the tribunal of God and the
world that, whatever our secret inclination and
intention, it was folly to abandon the parental
220 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
slipper by shouting aloud "no force against a
weaker nation"; finally, by resorting to negotiation
by ultimatum only as a corrective for the costly ills
of no negotiation whatever under the guise of a
benevolence which has wiped out our prestige
south of the Rio Grande and made the potting of
American traditions of liberty and justice the
sport of Mexican authority and the potting of
Americans the pastime of peons.
You are apt to think this a swing of the pendu-
lum with a vengeance. It is. It marks the
extreme of utility along the line of an established
policy in contrast with the futility of the weather-
vane of no policy whatever. It does not neces-
sarily mean intervention by force of arms but it
Joes mean business. It means that we would no
longer sit back and wait for advances from those
to whom delay brings nothing but profit, but that
when we are ready to deal there will either be
quick dealing or prompt trouble.
So far this argument has limited itself to
abstract reasoning; let us turn now to direct appli-
cation in a form easy to understand and conse-
THE ONLY WAY 221J
quently easy to value. The policy outlined has
three phases: assertion, graduated pressure, ne-
gotiation by ultimatum.
Under assertion we should (1) declare at once
to whoever happens to be in control of Mexico
an arbitrary price for every American murdered.
(2) We should secure the reestablishment of the
principle that government-owned railways are as
responsible as private concerns for the full value
of goods in transit. (3) We should demand
guarantees to commerce that tariff changes not
specifically legislated by the National Congress
shall bear ninety days' notice. (4) We should
insist that the confiscatory clauses of the constitu-
tion of May, 1917, or of any other constitution
shall not be retroactive against vested rights.
(5) We should demand that sources of revenue
pledged on the honor of the nation to specific for-
eign obligations, be collected for and applied to
those obligations. (6) We should stipulate that j
outrages amounting to specific persecution of the I
Catholic Church be indemnified and that the
222 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
principle of absolute freedom in religious belief
be reestablished.
Do these demands appear unreasonable? Are
you not astonished that not one of them has been
pressed by the Wilson administration? The
first two entail the suppression of banditry; they
must be drastically enforced to overcome the
natural belief of the peon acquired during the last
seven years that Americans can be murdered with
impunity and that property and loot are one and
the same thing. The third implies nothing beyond
the assurance that merchants who will not stoop
to bribery of government officials of every class,
from cabinet officer to tally clerk, will have an
equal chance with those who at present do. The
fourth carries out to fruition the principles laid
down in our stillborn fighting note of April 2,
1918. The fifth is merely a first step toward
warding off the fully justified outcry that we may
expect at any moment from England and France,
demanding that we either raise the embargo of
the Monroe Doctrine or insure their losses. The
sixth is a matter of elementary justice, demanding
THE ONLY WAY 223
nothing more than equal treatment for every
religious sect.
What are the steps of graduated pressure?
(1) Refusal to send an ambassador. (2) Post-
ponement of recognition. (3) Embargo on
loans, private or governmental. (4) Em-
bargo on exports and imports. (5) Closure of all
channels of communication by sea or land. (6)
Armed demonstration. (7) Intervention by
force of arms.
Count those steps, name them by the seven
names of the days of the week, and you will realize
two things: (1) their terrific power, especially
since we would in all probability be joined in No.
5 by England and France and possibly by Italy
and Spain, and (2) that there is a broad margin
of safety even for the pacifist between No. 1 and
No. 7. Incidentally, the shock that we would be
called upon to bear on waking up to find our
Mexican policy equipped with a backbone would
be nothing in comparison with the shock the same
discovery would bring to all and sundry of the
fermenting factions across the border.
224 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
Negotiation by ultimatum is the logical com-
bination of the tenets of assertion and of grad-
uated pressure. It will seem drastic only to those
who are not intimately acquainted with the history
of our relations with Mexico and who do not
know that in the art of verbal subterfuge any
Mexican who can read and write is our master.
Words mean everything to him; facts nothing.
Argument is not a means to an end but an end in
itself. He will gab about national honor, national
dignity, national pride, national sensitiveness and
national sovereignty by the day and by the year
to any one who will listen, but he will never say
by any chance or on any provocation but one,
"I admit the facts." The single provocation to
which he bows, the only argument which he
recognizes in his heart of hearts as valid in the
long run, is force. That assertion strikes at the
roots of his make-up; it applies equally to his
interstate, national and international relations.
It has just been demonstrated once more with
peculiar emphasis. It carries a lesson many times
repeated if we will only see it: whoever happens
THE ONLY WAY 225
to be on top, Diaz, Carranza, Obregon, Pablo
Gonzalez or the civilian Robles Dominguez,
Mexico is the same.
We now have the ingredients for a clear-cut
sample deal: Mexico requires $350,000,000; we
desire lasting stabilization of her internal and
international situation. The policy of assertion
implies that we do not wait, watchfully or other-
wise. We should seek out the individual in major-
ity control of Mexico and if there is none such,
the leader best suited to our needs, and make him
the following proposition. The United States will
facilitate to his government of Mexico a loan of
$350,000,000 on these conditions: That it be
applied in conjunction with the country's normal
sources of revenue, (1) to funding all national
indebtedness; (2) to liquidating foreign obliga-
tions; (3) to settlement of outstanding claims; (4)
to automatic indemnity for lives of foreigners
murdered; (5) to the guaranteeing of goods in
transit over national railways; (6) to the systematic
suppression of banditry; (7) to productive recon-
struction; (8) to the holding of free elections.
[226
IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
(9) The disbursing of all funds shall be intrusted
to an international commission; in short, economic
control.
Immediately upon acceptance of these terms
we should proceed to meet the events that would
inevitably follow in the most practical manner
at hand, either by strengthening the majority
control or by lending overwhelming support in the
form of funds, arms and ammunition to the leader
chosen as the instrument of reform. In case there
was categorical refusal from all important Mexican
factions we should issue ultimatum and promptly
apply our thumbscrew of graduated pressure,
concluding, if necessary, with military occupation.
I have outlined the transaction in what may
appear to be brutal brevity with the double in-
tention of leaving the issue clear beyond chance
of cavil and showing it in its worst light. We
would naturally use a certain measure of soft soap,
no P' ace * n ^is argument; it is
*
*** concerned only with grim actualities. And speak-
>\jjjjS/^|! ing of grim actualities there are two phrases em-
Jt&^ ployed above which will react on Mexicans as
THE ONLY WAY 227 \
red rags on a bull. One is "economic control";
the other is "military occupation." The stark
finality of each might have been made more
palatable by a coating of word-sugar but it
would have been at the expense of clarity. It is
intended that those phrases shall stand out naked-
ly because they are of paramount significance.
Economic control from without is the sine qua
non of peace with Mexico and of peace within
Mexico. Obregon or any other intelligent Mexi-
can knows this to be the truth even if he does not
dare say so publicly. Obregon cannot asfa for
such control, but in his heart of hearts he would
be glad to have it forced upon him. Why?
Because the maladministration of public funds
has been the cause of the downfall of every one of
the almost innumerable governments of the Mexi-
ican Republic. There is no exception, not even
the reign of Diaz, who personally was no thief.
Speaking of the Caja de Prestamos which Diaz
and his Minister, Limantour, had planned for the
salvation of the small farmer from the estate of
peonage and which, as it turned out, became
228 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
merely the instrument through which a coterie of
officials enriched themselves, W. F. McCaleb
says:* "And thus was launched what was to
prove to be one of the most colossal of Mexican
failures a failure which was to expose the Diaz
administration to attack for deliberately playing
into the hands of reckless friends. It is not to be
believed, however, that the great President or his
great minister were parties to any such plan.
They Were beaten at the game."
The italics are mine. They are intended to
emphasize the fact that not even a model of
honesty among Presidents aided by a world-
famous Minister of Finance of exceptional probity
could stand against the perennial tide of Mexican
graft which has overwhelmed one government
after another with monotonous repetition and with
every rising sweep has penetrated further and
further with its corrosive influence into the vitals
of the nation until to-day it is taken as a matter of
course that ninety per cent, of all Mexican officials
in positions of trust are openly corrupt and will
Present and Past Banking In Mexico, by W. F. McCaleb.
THE ONLY WAY 229
inevitably continue so until controlled by some
greater power than any single faction of their
peers.
This is not a case of the pot calling the kettle
black. We have graft in our city and occasionally
in our state governments on what appears to us a
large scale, but it almost invariably is graft in the
shape of a rake-off on contracts for something
actually produced, highways, public buildings or
major constructions. The graft of Mexico, how-
ever, is outright loot; its effect is to open simul-
taneously all the arteries of the body politic and
to pour the entire output of the life-blood of the
nation direct into the gullets of the group in power.
Practically every evil and every misery in Mexico,
C V intrinsically the richest land on earth, can be
traced to maladministration of public funds.
Wipe out authoritative robbery on a colossal scale,
even reduce it in terms of human frailty to a
reasonable average of official peculation such as
we have in this country, and Mexico's long epoch
of permanent unrest will come to an end.
We have an interest in that consummation and
230 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
we alone have the power and the opportunity to
bring it about. It is a cause to which altruists,
pacifists, merchants, consumers, dollar-diploma-
tists and citizens of every category can subscribe
with equal sincerity and profit. Even self-deter-
minists, if they will admit the fact of to-day as a
stepping-stone toward the dream of to-morrow,
will find in economic control the one germinating
seed of the tree of national life. Nor will its
blessings escape the perception of intelligent
Mexicans. From the lips out, they must assail
it with all the age-worn phrases of insulted sover-
eignty, but deep down in their hearts will ring
such a paean of thanksgiving as has seldom echoed
in the breasts of an entire people.
I have set forth in a previous chapter the
unholy alliance between the military and banditry
in Mexico; a bandit is either the direct evolution
of an unpaid soldier or he is armed and supplied
with ammunition by an unpaid soldier. Economic
control can destroy this alliance. How? By the
organization of a force of picked Mexicans, com-
manded by Mexicans, paid regularly and well for
THE ONLY WAY 23 1\
the preservation of order, dismissed promptly for
inefficiency. The plan is feasible. It is founded on
certain elementary principles of human nature
which have risen to the level of highly effective
pride in the Askaris of Africa no less than in our
own Texas Rangers, or the Canadian Mounted
Police of the Northwest. There is but one abso-
lutely essential condition : the power guaranteeing
the safety of the money-bag at its source must be
overwhelmingly greater than the power of any
factional general inheriting an incontrollable dis-
position to loot. In plain English we must make
it clear that we will immediately destroy any assail-
ant of the financial organization.
I have also set forth in a previous chapter the
fact that misery of the common people throughout
Mexico is and often has been as heartrending in its
own peculiar way as the tribulations of the
Armenians. Mexicans have not been massacred
by the thousands but they have been murdered
by the hundreds and semi-starved by the millions.
Summer and winter, year in and year out, they
have been under the yoke of the oppressor, no
232 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
lighter for having been dubbed with the ironical
title of "self -determinism." Factors of oppression
have led one group of the masses against another;
the masses have never in a single instance risen
against oppression though they have too often
been deluded into thinking they were doing so.
This condition arises from ignorance, ignorance
from almost universal penury and penury from
maladministration of public funds. Economic
control will eliminate it. So great are the present
natural resources of the country, so prolific the
known sources of undeveloped wealth, so wide the
possibilities of an industrial field swarming with
unemployed labor, that it is reasonable to assume
that ten years of financing along lines of legitimate
reconstruction would raise the per capita wealth
of the nation in ratio with its foreign indebtedness
to as high a level as that of any other people in the
world. That is an immediate material advantage
but it carries in addition the seeds of a spiritual
rejuvenation. It is almost an axiom that impov-
erished countries breed dishonesty in officials and
the converse is equally true; a nation rich in
THE ONLY WAY 233
distributed wealth can find honest servants on the
principle that full pockets tend to breed honest
men.
No one can imagine a scheme of national re-
construction which would not include the estab-
lishment of a comprehensive system of lower
education, and this feature alone of a broad-
minded economic control should provide the
leaven to raise Mexico in the course of years above
the necessity of tutelage and back to the plane of
an undivided sovereignty. For a century her
leaders have been breaking promises of educa-
tional reform; I propose nothing more radical
than to make them keep them.
It would be possible to continue for pages the
elucidation of details in connection with the
administration of economic control but enough has
already been said to indicate the spirit and the
scope of its proposed enforcement. A full list
of its benefits would only tend to befog the public
mind on the main issue of its necessity, of its
ultimate inevitability. The question is only one
of time. Shall we start now when the international
U34
IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
chess-board is swept clean of precedent or shall we
make a forced beginning at some later date in the
face of added complications?
Before some one else can say it for me, let me
state here and now that economic control is
intervention, administrative intervention to fore-
stall intervention under arms. Nothing short of a
conviction that maladministration of public funds
p is the sole cause of a permanent condition of unrest
in Mexico would justify this encroachment on her
sovereignty. On the other hand, nothing short of
the factors which make that unrest intolerable
to us, her nearness, the extent of American
interests already involved, the legitimate demands
of commerce, the annoyance of a constantly grow-
ing friction, the impossibility now or ever of escap-
ing from her into our treasured shell of isolation,
could present the eventual action as inevitable.
In addition to that argument we face the
obligation of a self-imposed responsibility. Under
the Wilson administration we placed Carranza
in power and assured him more autocratic latitude
in any given month of his reign than we accorded
THE ONLY WAY 235
* .-
to Diaz during a quarter of a century of order.
We were active parties to a more complete looting
and destruction of national resources in Mexico
than has ever before been accomplished. And to
what an end! Bear witness not only the present
upset of the Mexican garbage can but the silent
protest of five hundred and sixty-four Americans
murdered by a blood-relation as surely and as
futilely as was Abel by Cain.
It has already been indicated that we should
beware of dickering in promissory notes with
Obregon or any other dominant leader in Mexico.
It should be the intention of the policy of asser-
tion to deal with hard facts as they turn up and let
hopeful illusions take care of themselves, to give
practical assistance on the basis of cash on delivery
with the legal three days of grace and no more.
The steps of graduated pressure, seven in number,
by which this end is to be obtained, I have already
listed and they are entitled to certain explanatory
comment.
The first, refusal to send a fresh ambassador,
has already received the effective sanction of the
236 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
Senate but, standing alone, it has little immediate
force. In fact, the efficacy of the seven steps
proposed depends on their cumulative weight
being brought rapidly into play. To put it graph-
ically, we should say in effect, "Accept our terms
or we will refuse you an ambassador on Sunday,
deny you recognition on Monday, embargo
loans on Tuesday, stop all exports and imports on
Wednesday, close all channels of communication on
Thursday, make a naval demonstration on Fri-
day and begin intervention under arms on
Saturday."
The writer is not one of those superficial invest-
igators of Mexico who have rashly prophesied
that any given division of Mexicans will support
intervention even when on its face it will operate
to the personal profit of the group in question.
He knows that such is not the case. ^Mexican
will tell you in private that he prays jiightly for
intervention but he knows that should he make
the confession in public he would do it at the peril
of his life. Nor do I believe that economic control
will be accepted by any governing faction in
**-v ,
THE ONLY WAY 237
Mexico without a fight unless the faction and the
country at large are persuaded of its inevitability.
This means that we should face frankly the
problem of military occupation. It is my personal
opinion that a proper application of the six pre-
ceding steps of pressure will make this last resort
unnecessary, but in justice to that large section of
the American public which has acquired a very
natural aversion toward the mere name of war on
the grounds that it is too costly in lives and money,
certain special features of the Mexican situation
should be emphasized. In the first place, the
rounding-up of Mexico could in all probability
be accomplished with our regular army supported
by volunteers at a cost of less lives than we have
lost by murder in that country since the fall
of Diaz. In the second place, this war would pay
for itself and leave a dividend not only in happi-
ness to tortured millions but in actual cash.
It is not long since the press reported that the
State of Texas had offered to undertake from its
own resources the complete subjection of Mexico if
Washington would merely give its sanction and
_. rl / ^
""^
238 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
while it is doubtful that the story is genuine, it
nevertheless contains a kernel of truth in its
assumption of military weakness across the border.
We do not have to go back to the fact that General
Scott won an uninterrupted jequerae_ cO&ttles
and finally took Mexico City with a paltry ten
thousand men in his command; we need only
consider that Mexico to-day is weak not because
^Mexicans are poor fighters bu]t because they have
neither money, nor arms, nor ammunition to fight
with.
It is for this reason that the term "military
occupation" has been employed. The organized
resistance which a sufficient and fully equipped
invasion would be called upon to meet would be
negligible. By an overwhelming advantage not
only in numbers but in armament our losses could
be reduced to a minimum and would doubtless be
wholly accounted for by sniping.
By far the most important mission of the army
would be the rapid pacification of ports and chan-
nels of commerce, for in this feature alone there
would lie a prompt and surprisingly large cash
THE ONLY WAY 239
return to our temporary authority as well as to
native merchants, and there is no force quite so
stabilizing as prosperity. Carranza's Controller
of the Exchequer gave it out on more than one
occasion that the army was swallowing sixty per
cent, of the total revenue of the country and
according to Carranza's own statement that rev-
enue for the current fiscal year was to amount to
$60,000,000,
The World War got us so accustomed to talking
in billions that it is difficult to realize that an
armed misunderstanding with Mexico has no
single feature in common with the work we had
to do in Europe, least of all as regards financing.
The $36,000,000 which Mexico herself admits to
be the price she paid her army for not pacifying
the country, added to the large sum which we
are spending regularly in policing the border,
a sum which since the fall of Diaz already totals
over a billion dollars, should very nearly cover
the entire expense of feeding pacification to her
from an iron spoon.
What are the sources of her revenue? Import
240 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
taxes, export taxes, internal excise. Ninety per
cent, of the first two flow through the seaports of
Tampico, Vera Cruz and Progresso and the land
ports of entry on the border at Brownsville, Eagle
Pass, Laredo, El Paso and Nogales. We should
ignore all other points until after the taking of
Mexico City.
The steps for the subjection of the country,
not including total pacification, have naturally
been fully discussed on more than one occasion by
our military authorities and are easy of compre-
hension. In a nutshell they would comprise the
formation of main bases at San Antonio, Galves-
ton and New Orleans; landings and subsidiary
bases at Tampico and Vera Cruz; two columns,
one from Laredo, one from Tampico converging
on Monterey where another strong base would be
formed to withstand attacks from Chihuahua;
two columns, one from Monterey and another
from Tampico converging on San Luis Potosi, and
after that all would be over bar the shouting as
far as mere conquest is concerned.
These advances would all be along railways and
THE ONLY WAY 241
the same principle should be followed in the tedious
work of pacifying the whole country. We should
follow and possess thoroughly every railway
radiating from Mexico City. Once that important
step was taken we would be in immediate control
of more revenue than Carranza ever thought of
collecting, for it is an admitted fact that fifty per
cent, of railroad receipts and forty per cent, of
collections at Mexican ports of entry were never
accounted for to the Carranza government.
This point of material benefit is stressed merely
to support the contention that an occupation of
Mexico could be made to pay for itself; but there
are many Americans who do not worry over the
cost of armed intervention half as much as they
worry over the difficulties confronting occupation
and total pacification. Basing their estimates on
our experience in the Philippines, they say that
the same accomplishment in Mexico would require
ten years and a million men.
I dispute that prediction, not from military
knowledge but from a knowledge of economic and
social conditions in Mexico and of the personal
242 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
equation. Carranza at the height of his power
never controlled all the important towns and
railways of the country, but he could have done so
had the military at any time been sincere in his
support or in the work of wiping out banditry.
The Mexican military never could be sincere in
such a work of self-elimination. There is no
question that our army would be sincere, and it
is my opinion that with important towns, railways
and ports, the total sources of revenue, firmly
held and protected, pacification would follow
automatically. The tendency of the peon is
overwhelmingly toward peace. The moment
markets presented a more profitable return than
looting, markets would begin to win him.
This process would be slow unless we aided it
by certain highly effective innovations (in Mexico)
such as the offering of twenty-five cents for every
cartridge turned in, twenty dollars for every gun
and from five thousand to ten thousand dollars
for every listed bandit leader delivered dead or
alive, preferably dead, with a special prize of
thirty thousand dollars for Pancho Villa dead. I
THE ONLY WAY 243
am not joking. This is good sense, if ever good
sense was put in print. It is equally good reason-
ing to say that it would be possible to build up by
an appeal to pride more rapidly in Mexico than in
any other country a force of well paid Mexicans
under Mexican leaders who would keep order with
an iron hand in any district wholly entrusted to
them and who would in turn be kept in order by
personal profit linked to fear of the consequences of
defection. Such a force would be the natural and
most efficient instrument for cleaning up all out-
lying districts.
In conclusion I wish to repeat that the policy
of assertion broadly sketched in this chapter need
not lead to armed intervention in Mexico nor will
it lead to that extreme unless our interminable
administrative vacillation during the last seven
years has made it absolutely impossible for the
Mexican mind to believe that we at last mean
business. This policy not only is a policy, but it
presents Mexico with an alternative, a hard alter-
native but nevertheless a choice; economic control
or military occupation. I desire to go on record
244 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
with the assertion that there is no middle ground.
If we stop short of economic control, we will
travel again and again mere byroads to peace.
Negotiation with any ruler of Mexico which does
not cling to economic control as an irreducible
minimum will be nothing but a mowing of the
disastrous weeds that spring perennially from
maladministration of public funds in that un-
happy country.
In surrendering the case of Mexico to the
judgment and the verdict of the public, I wish to
disclaim emphatically any chauvanistic tendency
but in the same breath I wish to assert that Mexico
in the hands of any oligarchy is ajksjfeatoui^back,
pricking us to-day, ready to stab us to-morrow. If
any one can read these pages, condensed from an
enormous mass of corroborative material for the
benefit of the practical man in a hurry, and doubt
the whole-hearted sincerity of the contention that
they point the way toward a lasting peace, it will
be because his mind's eye has been dulled by too
much long-distance gazing.
For seven years we have allowed ourselves to
THE'ONLY WAY 245
be led into ignoring the dominance of fact in the
daily life of nations as well as of individuals. Who
is foolish, the man who sees a mess and grabs for
a mop or he who attempts to stand in the traffic
at the corner of Broadway and Forty-second
Street to fly a kite, fixes his persistent gaze upon
it and murmurs over and over again, "The kite
is at peace." I refuse to be a party to the flying
of a kite of self-defeating altruism at the expense
of our own broken bones and in the face of the
age-long oppression of an entire people.
On May twenty-sixth of this year The Freeman
headed its "Current Comment'* with the following
remarks: "Here is something really worth while.
In Washington, May tenth, Mr. Chamberlain, our
former Consul-General in Mexico, gave a straight-
forward, four-square, definite programme of what
we should do in Mexico:
"We should offer a loan sufficient to put its
finances in shape, bound up with a treaty which
would give us direct supervision of its economic
affairs. The second step should be to withdraw
the present recognition unless that was accepted.
Still failing acceptance, the third step should be
246 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
embargo; the fourth, commercial blockade; the
fifth, a naval demonstration; lastly, a military
occupancy.
"One can understand that kind of talk and re-
spect it. It is free from the nauseating humbug and
buncombe which always goes with a British or
American project of robbing one's neighbours. It
advocates simple and undecorated highwaymanry;
and if we can't resist the temptation to steal Mex-
ico's property, let us by all means have the manly
hardihood to say so, and not go snuffling around
with our customary line of disgusting cant about
doing Mexico for her own good, making Mexico
safe for democracy, or what not. All honour to
Mr. Chamberlain; this paper detests his doctrine,
but it respects him sincerely, and trusts that his
example will prevail mightily among the other
buccaneers in Washington whose jaws are slaver-
ing over Mexico at this moment."
The qualified flattery of this excerpt more than
balances the epithets of "highwayman" and
"buccaneer." I welcome all of its inferences.
The difference between Editor Fuller and myself,
THE ONLY WAY 247
aside from the nationality betrayed by his spelling,
is the age-long division between the theorist with
a pen and the man with the mop. There are cer-
tain natures which will endure an open cesspool
because it happens to be located across a garden
boundary line; there are others to which an open
cesspool is a cesspool and a nuisance wherever
you find it. The right of a country to misgovern
itself is comparatively new in print but as dead in
practise as the divine right of kings. The sources
of this world's wealth are irrepressible springs;
the peoples who give them no adequate outlet are
doomed to be swept away sooner or later by the
flood of their release at the touch of an alien wand.
That assertion is founded on the theory of no man
nor even on common sense; it merely states an
historical fact of social evolution, not as com-
munists would wish to see it but as nature ordains.
It is not our fault that the law exists, but we all
know it by heart; why not say so and be done
with hypocrisy.
Nor is the welfare of humanity divided into so
many city lots entailed in perpetuity to this or
248 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
that nation regardless of the uses to which the
inheritance is put. The course of human welfare
has its own fixed laws and its own slow but sure
way of crossing arbitrary racial boundaries. Why
fool ourselves or attempt to fool the world with
admirable but ridiculous aspirations of isolation
which become criminal the moment they make
our eyes roll heavenward or toward Armenia in
order to avoid looking in the face a job of impera-
tive hygiene next door?
There are doubtless among my readers some old
enough in years or in historical recollection to
recall the vogue of the Manifest Destiny, the
slogan of those American statesmen who openly
championed the absorption of Mexico and Central
America. Never was a movement better named.
Disclaimed by generations, denied by politicians,
repudiated by administrations, it travels its ap-
pointed road so ponderously that intervals of
decades half obliterate the memory of its last
advance; even presidents who would obstruct its
course come to the full sense of their impotence
THE ONLY WAY 249
only when it has swallowed and digested them.
So in days to come the historian will see in Presi-
dent Wilson, the altruist, an individual who by
vicariously carrying chaos in Mexico to its highest
pitch will have done the most toward destroying
that country's national entity.
Does this mean that the fulfillment of the Mani-
fest Destiny in terms of territorial acquisition is
inevitable whatever we do? It does not. It
means that such a result is inevitable if we do
nothing. There is just one way to fight a prairie
fire and that is by starting another fire; there is
just one way to obstruct the march of human wel-
fare on its way to fill a vacuum and that is by the
establishment of an opposing growth of like auak
vv
\The Mexican peoplesjare certainly worth saving
and they will be saved if altruists can be shelved A\
long enough for practical men to throw out a life-
line; but if dreamers are to fiddle in Washington
while the fires of oppression continue to burn across
the border the day will inevitably come when the
250 IS MEXICO WORTH SAVING
absorption of Mexico, lock, stock and barrel, will
be forced down our throats by the rigid finger of a
destiny as implacable as the laws which decree
that water shall flow down-hill.
Americans to-day are surprisingly unanimous
in their hope for a new hand on the helm of the
ship of state. As regards Mexico, Republicans
and Democrats alike demand no spectacular
evolutions but a radical and deliberate change of
the course out of the doldrums of stagnation and
into the clean and open sea. Either party on
assuming the fresh mandate could well subscribe
to the following creed: Believing that there is an
underlying cause for the permanent condition of
unrest during a century of self-determination in the
Republic of Mexico and that toe should fully recog-
nize no new government in that country until the
rights of Americans no less than those of the sub-
merged masses of the Mexicans shall have been
safeguarded by treaty stipulations insuring inter"
national justice and internal stability, toe acknowl-
edge an obligation to substitute an active policy to
THE ONLY WAY 251
this end in place of the negative and destructive
passivity which during the Wilson administration
has uprooted American traditions and at the same
time brought nothing but disaster to the Mexicans
themselves.
THE END
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