Porfirio would have reached out his hand and drawn me back to jail.' I said, 'Why could he arrest you?' and the answer given me, falteringly and in fear, was, 'Because I owe the store.'

"He had lived and worked on that finca for twelve years; alive or dead, he is there to-day, unless he has run away to join an army in the revolution. I asked that Mexican peon where he had come from, and he pointed across the mountains to a valley where his people had lived for a thousand years. 'Why did you leave there?' I inquired. His answer was that Don Porfirio had given the land where he was born to a Chinaman.

"From an investigation I made myself I found out that this was literally true; that the land, which was the hereditary possession of these Indians, had been taken from them by the Government and given to a greater 'company' on terms which one can only guess; that the 'company' had sold the land to a syndicate, in which there were no Americans, upon condition that it should be populated under a law somewhat similar to our homestead law, with the reservation that it was neither to go to Mexican natives nor to citizens of the United States, and the immigrants with which the syndicate was populating that part of Mexico were Chinamen.

"I crossed a bridge on the Camino Real. 'The last time I crossed that bridge,' said the peon who was with me, 'the governor of the State was lying there dead. He had become ambitious and presented to the people a program of reform. Doubtless he hoped to be another Juarez, and Don Porfirio had ended his ambitions.' The peon of Mexico and out of possibly 15,000,000 inhabitants at least 12,000,000 are peons-is a kindly and gentle creature under normal conditions, disregardful of his own life but not anxious to make war on anyone. The peon has it forced upon his mind that he belongs to a definite sphere of life, and so he is without ambition and without foresight; but he is not without intelligence, and he makes an excellent workman when taught. All he needs is a chance to live and a chance to learn, land to cultivate, and schools to go to. Is it conceivable that to add to the miseries of these struggling people any American citizen would want to make war on them?

"We of the United States have the impulse that all virile people have. We feel conscious of our ability to do a job in nation making much better than anyone else. Read over Kipling's poem, 'The White Man's Burden.' It was not so much the white man's duty to clean up insanitary conditions on the outskirts of civilization and to develop the backward peoples of the earth that he was expressing as it was our perfect, self-complacent appreciation of our supreme

ability to do the cleaning up better than any other people on the face of the globe.

"There is a good deal of the special policeman, of the sanitary engineer, of the social worker, and of the welfare dictator about the American people. We are quite conscious that in the development of this great country of ours, in our march across the continent, we have done a perfectly good job, and the pioneering spirit is very much alive. It is one of the most fundamental instincts that has made white men give to the world its history for the last thousand years.

"As a great Nation, dedicated to democracy, we cannot undertake a war of conquest against a people because their moral development has been neglected by their former rulers. We can, however, insist, and we must insist, that these people shall make safe our borders and give protection to the lives and property of our nationals who have settled in Mexico at her invitation."

"But is there no way, Mr. Secretary, in which the United States can help Mexico on the road to progress?" I asked. Mr. Lane said: "To directly offer help to Mexico would be looked upon by them as an insult, like slapping them in the face. This is a kind of pride that is purely Latin. It is an inheritance that comes to Mexico by way of Spain along with the ideals that Cervantes ridicules in 'Don Quixote'; but it is so real a thing that no progress can be made without recognizing it. So I say that to tell Mexico what she shall do in our straight-out American fashion, to say to Mexico, We are going to help you without being invited to do so, is equivalent under present conditions to a declaration of war.

"The Mexicans do not believe in our professions of altruism. We must say to Mexico one of two things: Either you must keep our border safe and protect the rights of our nationals in Mexico, which you have not done, or we will invade your country and restore order ourselves; or we must say to Mexico, We understand the effort you are making to give the people a chance for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and we will gladly help you if you ask our help to accomplish this end.

"The last is the policy that the United States has been seeking to put into effect. The difficulty in doing this arises almost solely out of the difficulty we Americans have in persuading the peoples of Latin America that our intentions are really honest.

"Nor is this altogether to be wondered at. Latin America has known the American chiefly as a seeker after concessions, a land grabber and an exploiter. Even where the American has bought property, as many have who to-day hold perfectly legal title to the

land, they are absentee landlords, and every just criticism that the Irishman has had to make against the absentee English landlord can be made against the absentee American landlord in Mexico.

"He does not become a part of Mexico; he does not throw in his lot with the Mexicans. He is willing to spend his money there and employ labor, but he has nothing in common with the people of the country. The Mexican feels that the American goes there only to get rich out of the land and labor of Mexico; that he comes to exploit, not to develop."

Mr. Lane had risen. He was standing on the raised veranda of his camp overlooking the placid waters of Lake Champlain. "There are just two more things that I want to say," he continued.

"There has never been a time since the United States established the present Mexican border under the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo when raids, small or great, have not taken place across that border, and sometimes Americans have been the raiders-we may as well acknowledge the fact. Furthermore, there never has been a time since the United States was founded when Mexico itself was a whole in the control of any one Government. Even Diaz never had the Yaqui Indian country, never really controlled Sonora.

"A police force alone has been a failure in Mexico. A failure both as far as the Mexicans are concerned and in protecting American life and American property. American life and American property have both been repeatedly assailed and destroyed during every administration. The protection of our people there has always been a problem, and I believe always will be a problem. This hazard any foreigner takes who goes into a country filled with people who would risk their lives for a horse or a saddle.

"Further, I say this: That looking at Mexico solely from the standpoint of allowing our miners, our engineers, and our capitalists to develop that country for their own benefit, and only incidentally for the benefit of Mexico, a policy of force is all that Mexico needs. It is the only policy that has ever been tried upon the Mexican people, and it has proved a success for the exploitation of the country by outsiders. If, however, we look at the Mexican question from the standpoint of the Mexican, is the policy of force adequate to the problem ? No one who has studied it will say so. The truth is this:

"Mexico will never be a nation in any real sense, nor will the Mexicans ever be a people of agricultural, commercial, industrial, or political consequence until the individual Mexican has had an economic and an educational chance. He must be tied to Mexico, and not to a landlord, by the ownership of a piece of land; he must be able to read

and write, so that he may know what the needs of civilization are. This policy is that which I characterized as a policy of hope and hopefulness. It is founded on doubt and despair. It refuses to recognize the Mexican who can only be shot into keeping order.

"If we despair of these people, who is to be their friend? Are we Americans to see Mexico forever remain a land of a few rich and cultivated gentlemen, and 12,000,000 half-starved, ill-clothed, and illiterate peasants-men, women, and children-kept in slavery and subjection and ignorance, a people into whose lives comes nothing that raises them above the beasts of the field?

"The people of the United States cannot conceive of such conditions. Is it not time to try another policy than that of force alone, which has failed so miserably and wrought such woe? Is President Wilson to be criticized because he believes that it is not idealistic, not outside the range of reasonable hope, to think of America as the helpful friend of Mexico? Why may not Mexico be led to see that we are honest in our willingness to help and that we can do it?

"President Wilson has clearly seen the end that he desired from the first, and he has worked toward it against an opposition that was cunning and intensive, persistent and powerful. If he succeeds in giving a new birth of freedom to Mexico, he most surely will receive the verdict of mankind."

THE MEXICAN QUESTION

(3) THE ARTICLE BY PRESIDENT WILSON REPRINTED HERE APPEARED IN THE ISSUE OF THE "LADIES' HOME JOURNAL" FOR OCTOBER, 1916

Large questions are difficult to state in brief compass, but they can be intelligently comprehended only when fully stated, and must to all candid persons seem worthy of the pains. The Mexican question has never anywhere been fully stated, so far as I know, and yet it is one which is in need of all the light that can be thrown upon it, and can be intelligently discussed only by those who clearly see all that is involved.

In the first place, it is not a question which can be treated by itself as only a matter between Mexico and the United States. It is a part, a very intimate part, of the Pan-American question. The two Americas can be knitted together only by processes of peace, friendship, helpfulness, and good will, and the nation which must of necessity take the initiative in proving the possibility of these processes is the United States.

A discussion of the Pan-American question must always begin with the Monroe Doctrine, and very little light will be thrown upon it unless we consider the Monroe Doctrine from the point of view of Latin-America rather than from the point of view of the United States.

In adopting the Monroe Doctrine the United States assumed the part of Big Brother to the rest of America. The primary purpose of the policy was to prevent the extension to the American Hemisphere of European influences, which seemed likely to involve South America and eventually ourselves as well in the net of European intrigue and reaction which was in that day being spread with so wide a sweep of purpose. But it was not adopted at the request of the American Republics. While it no doubt made them measurably free from the fear of European aggression or intervention in their affairs, it neither gave nor implied any guarantee on the part of the United States that we would use our power for their benefit and not for our own aggrandizement and advantage.

As the power of the United States has increased, the uneasiness