may do so only through a Mexican corporation in which the foreign stock holdings are definitely in the minority, or by renouncing all right to diplomatic protection and agreeing to consider themselves Mexicans with regard to that property. The Department of State, however, has again and again declared that, even though an American should so divest himself of the right of appeal, this Government cannot consider that it is estopped from protesting and protecting its national in case of a denial of justice in Mexican administrative or judicial procedure.

The Department of State has reiterated, nevertheless, its recognition of the full right of Mexico to legislate for the future, and the present controversies are definitely confined to cases where the United States Government holds that the Constitution has been or may be applied retroactively to destroy American-owned property that was legally acquired prior to 1917.

Mexico has from time to time brought up the fact that in certain American states, notably Arizona and Illinois, foreigners are not allowed to buy property. Secretary Kellogg replied to this contention in his note of January 28, 1926, pointing out that both the Illinois Law of 1897 and the Arizona law of 1913 ‘are expressly made to apply to future acquisitions of real property and do not apply to property already acquired.' He states also that, on the other hand, the Mexican land law requires the alien owner of many rural properties 'to divest himself of the ownership, control, and management of his property.'

Mexicans, none the less, do not expect to be deserted by capital. This is one of the facts of which we often lose sight. No Mexican, in discussing the future possibilities of the development of his country, has the slightest doubt that foreigners will flock there, once

the legal tangle of the old property values is cleared up. In the note of October 7, 1926, Mr. Saenz says:

Investments which may be made in the future, and they will undoubtedly be made, because capital and enterprising men will always adapt themselves to new legislative conditions, will indisputably be of much greater importance than the interests which exist at present.

Mexico is certainly not anti-property, but she is firmly anti-capitalistic, and, at the moment, anti-American, in her enforcement of the provisions of her Constitution. There is a calm determination not to yield now to American pressure, chiefly because to yield now would be, in Mexico's concept, to continue forever, within the nation, a privileged group. It may well be that when the power of the Mexican Government is firmly settled there will still be the buying of privilege that there has been during the years of uncertainty, when capital had no rights and yet in strange ways (not widely advertised) still was enabled to worry along, whether or not Washington could furnish effective protection, or whether or not the Department of State could make an 'arrangement' with the current Mexican Government. But I suspect that even the most honest of the Mexican leaders will consider it a happier condition than if the foreigner had actual legal rights greater - in any sense or by any means than the native Mexican's. In that ground I think we shall find the Mexican honest man, grafter, agitator, or humble peon as firmly embedded as in the dogmas of his individual religion.

III

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There is no doubt that the Mexican shoe pinches in Washington. Those who have kept watch at the Department of State through the long months

of the controversy have noted from time to time not a little exasperation on the receipt of these elaborately embroidered Mexican documents, with the sting hidden under words or within words. Why this exasperation, evident to others as well as to us of the press? Why is there apparently a deep resentment that makes distrust and dislike almost the basic tenets of our official attitude toward the Mexican problem?

There is, to begin with, no very pronounced knowledge or understanding of that Mexican psychology that baffles older heads in Latin American matters than Mr. Coolidge's or Mr. Kellogg's or Mr. Sheffield's. They have tried again and again, with more or less unsuccess, to reach in their notes a touchstone that will bring a compliance with their requests, or with their demands. Once, as most readers of the newspapers will remember, Secretary of State Kellogg made a formal statement to the press about what the United States Government thought of President Calles. These words from that statement of June 12, 1925, brought an avalanche of denials and protests from Mexico:

The Government of Mexico is now on

trial before the world. We have the greatest interest in the stability, prosperity, and independence of Mexico. We have been patient and realize, of course, that it takes time to bring about a stable government, but we cannot countenance violation of her obligations and failure to protect American citizens.

been told what was really meant. But no answer was ever made, and to-day some of the deepest of all the unsayable things with regard to the policy of Washington toward Mexico are hidden beneath the débris that this remark brought down upon the head of a very much astonished Secretary of State.

Then, there is a disagreement as honest as it is profound over the American and Mexican points of view on the importance in world affairs (and in Mexican affairs) of the Mexican revolution. There is no reason for denying that, from the point of view of a practical, business-economy American administration, the supreme stupidity of the Mexican revolution has never really been forgiven. Washington simply cannot now, and perhaps never will, see a possible justification of the Mexican revolution in the social reforms attained or crudely begun. The Mexican diplomatic notes, meanwhile, go glibly ahead and present the new dogmas of the revolution, even the latest law passed by the legislatures, as if each phase of it even those only a month old had the binding force on the whole world of the centuries of accumulated equity of the AngloSaxon common law.

The graft of Mexico, to the mind of Washington, wipes out, also, much of the force of the Mexican discussions of right and justice. Mexico insists that the courts are not subject to the Executive, and Minister Saenz is very sad over the naïveté of Washington in thinking that they can possibly be. Mexico solemnly enacts her complicated laws and piles legal conflict upon legal conflict, and yet the accidental suggestion by Washington that this may be done for the benefit of Mexican lawyers would grieve the Mexican Government beyond words. The graft in Mexico is, however, colossal.

To-day the methods are more subtle

than in the early revolutionary days, but the present laws and all their innumerable regulations place the control of permits, of water, of wood, of transport, and so forth, in the hands of a horde of minor officials. They speak (to the thought of Washington that is never, now, put on paper) a peril for years to come to honest men in Mexico, be they foreigners or Mexicans.

In the course of the controversies over the oil laws, Mexico has brought forward many extraneous issues. Never fear, she has mentioned the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act. On March 1, 1926, Secretary Kellogg replied, on that point, as follows:

The liquor business in the United States was not a property right but a licensed occupation which was subject to the fullest extent at all times to the police powers of the states, to license by the United States, to the war powers of the Federal Government, and now, subject under the constitutional amendment, to the police powers of the United States.

The Mexican Foreign Minister did not fail, however, to make a point out of this statement, regarding the conflict of systems which he so often emphasizes. In his note of March 27, 1926, Mr. Saenz writes:

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By way of merely explaining the reference made on the subject by this department, I venture to say to your excellency that in Mexico the word ownership is understood to mean not only the dominion of the material thing, but also the same faculty over a right, and that was the point of view from which the allusion under consideration was made.

Late in 1926 the international relations of Mexico and the United States came to grips over Nicaragua. The issue became, in a few weeks, the overshadowing phase of the whole problem. The oil controversy was forgotten for days, both by the press and, apparently,

There is no doubt that Russian radicals were active in Mexico in 1917, and since. So, also, were American radicals, and they were and have been rather more practical than the Russians, and quite as anti-American. There seems no doubt, however, that Moscow has striven definitely for the gradual turning of Latin America against the United States. Mexico has had a part in this, in various ways, chiefly through propaganda, but Mexico's support of

Moscow in Latin America has been because Mexico seeks a leadership in Latin America to which the hegemony of the United States is the chief obstacle. The lessening of American influence through Russian antiimperialistic propaganda fits in with the Mexican plan, and it is largely if not entirely for this reason that the two work as closely as they do in Central and South America.

The anti-Church agitation in Mexico, which is again active, and into which the United States is from time to time drawn in spirit if not in action, is not basically Communistic or Bolshevistic, to continue the use of that word. In the early years of the sixteenth century, the Vatican gave to the King of Spain the rights to the revenues of the Church in Mexico, as in all Spanish America. The net result, in the centuries that

followed, was that the clergy kept as much of that revenue in Mexico as possible they could not send it to Rome and they did not want too much of it to get to Madrid. They invested fabulous sums not counting the labor, which the Indians were allowed to give free — in nine thousand superb colonial churches, most of which stand to-day. In addition, immense sums were invested in church lands, or loaned out at rates of interest as low as five per cent a year; Charles II of Spain tried to call in forty-four million pesos of these funds.

The Church opposed the early revolutionaries when they sought to take over the rights of the King of Spain to the church revenues as they took over other royal prerogatives. The battle has waged from that day to this. The churches and their property were confiscated in 1859; the reiteration and reënforcement of those old laws in 1917 and in 1926 had no great significance, except that they aroused the Catholics of the United States. The church problem in Mexico, so far as the Government is concerned, is chiefly economic; at its worst it is a denial of religious property rights in order to make the Church legitimate loot for the armies, and at its best it is an effort to place religion — the Roman Catholic religion - back in the spiritual field instead of the material.

the mere tool of Wall Street than Mexico is the tool of Moscow.

Yet, our policy and Mexico's policy have, between them, gotten us nowhere. Is there another policy that we both could follow, a policy that would really turn us toward a solution? Not dreams, now, but a practical plan that will carry us forward, that will solve the oil mess, and the land mess, and the mining mess, and all the others, and that will solve Mexico's difficulties and leave her a chance at that new Constitution she has never yet had an opportunity to enjoy to the full and complete extent of all its extravagances. Is there such a policy?

I think there is. I have had a growing conviction that the policy of to-day is an incomplete one and that the correction of that incompleteness does not mean an overthrow or necessarily a great change from what has been, but an addition to it, a relationship that would bring our own aims, and Mexico's, clearly into the light of the searching, yet friendly, scrutiny of the wisest and most potent minds in both countries.

Essentially the situation is that the policy of the United States toward Mexico (and of Mexico toward the United States) has, and must ever have, two phases. One is immediate, the other cumulative. The problem of the moment, on our side, is always the protection of American lives and property that, as Secretary Evarts said, is a 'paramount obligation,' the obligation for which governments are created. That policy of protection we have followed, and follow to-day, over a rough and uncertain road, with no goal in sight, only an endless duty. The other policy overlaps, but does not touch, the immediate crises and their trends. Yet it builds, whether we wish it or not, the foundation upon which we shall stand in the future, when in that future we meet again the immediate

issue again the protection of American lives and property. That overlapping, cumulative policy can be controlled, however, as the immediate policy cannot. It can be made to produce for us a fountain of precreated good will, as well as, if not so easily as, a groundwork of ill will and distrust such as both we and Mexico inherit to-day.

The Mexican question will probably never even approach a solution until there sits in the great Secretaryship of State a man schooling himself, not only to meet the problems of the moment with firmness and understanding, but to build, in the very midst of the succeeding Mexican crises, the friendly foundations for the solutions of the problems of twenty-five years hence.

Could it be done? Could we do it without getting hurt? Ah, that is another question. We might get badly 'hurt' oil wells might even be confiscated, or destroyed, land and mining titles wiped out. But it would be worth trying. My Latin American friend suggested leaving Mexico alone. That is not the solution. We must make Mexico our friend, or we gain nothing by leaving her alone, save a return to the days of border raids, battles, and then conquests, as in 1840-48 some of the saddest pages of them all for Mexico.

Suaviter in modo — and, if need be, fortiter in re. It is that 'gently in manner' that will build for the future; 'firmly in fact' may be needed, I freely admit, in the problems of the present. Yet, however firm, no note we send to Mexico should be couched in any but words of sympathy. Heaven knows there is basis enough for sympathy, even if we take only the bitterness of Mexican pronouncements, or the innuendoes she buries for us in her notes if we are big enough to see, and to pity. The American ambassador to Mexico should, for such an end, always be an

ambassador of good will, whatever his difficulties or exasperations. He must be ready, despite Shakespearian injunction, to dull his palm with entertainment of a dozen hundreds of men he may not like, or understand, at first. An ambassador opening schools in dingy, stupid, pitiful Indian villages, an ambassador entertaining and working and living close to the Mexicans, learning, changing his point of view each day, if he will and if new light comes to him. There is, to-day, no job on earth harder than being American ambassador to Mexico. This job just outlined is harder than any ambassador to Mexico has yet conceived it to be.

And not merely the ambassador, but American foundations, endowed institutions, colleges, universities, federations of art and labor, trade-unions they must be brought into the picture, understandingly, loyally, having the facts and knowing the needs and the difficulties, and yet going in. Some of the greatest, indeed, are in Mexico today, seeking for common ground and common problems with Mexico, and in common labor finding friendship and coöperation and understanding. It is all fantastic, mad-even what has been done already. Yet what have we gained from all our worldly wisdom that has kept, and still keeps, our official world so far aloof and apart from the new Mexico of to-day?

As for the Secretary of State - why can he not do, why does he not do, what Mr. Baldwin and M. Briand and Herr Stresemann do in Europe to-day, and what their predecessors have done for centuries? Why could he not visit back and forth, informally and so frequently that the significance dies away, with the Mexican Minister of Foreign Affairs in Mexico City as well as in Washington?

What would Europe be to-day without that very exchange? Were not such