Clarence Walker Barron

“ Seventeen million people on the richest mineral territory of the world, that can grow anything in the world and produce food in abundance every month of the year, use their cartridges for currency; and their national soul can never be born under that miserable motto of self-interests, "Mexico for the Mexicans," which means Zapata for Zapata, Carranza for Carranza, Pelaez for Pelaez, Villa for Villa, until every part is for itself and nobody for the whole. ”

“ Returning north, I find Canada, seven million of people, on a soil that works only three or four months of the year, sacrificing state and national treasure to develop national transportation, and until this war dependent upon foreign credit, now summoning all her resources, not for Canada, which needs no defense, but for civilization and the empire of which she is a part; giving more than four hundred thousand of her best men to the battle line and over a billion of her treasure and earnings for the funds of war; and men, women, and children working every possible hour of the twenty-four. ”

“ But Sonora and Mexico are rapidly passing into a new day whence all that has been will be as yesterday, and to-morrow will be bright with promise.
The world now touches the sunshine of Southern California, eating its sun-kissed oranges, its sun-dried figs, its new seedless raisins, and the fruit of its alligator pear trees, transplanted from Mexico. Its deep valleys are raising the finest cotton; its motor highways are jewels in the crown of a State promoting intercourse over wide reaches betwixt its peoples. ”

“ But you stand on the top of this little mound and feel the pulsation of something almost human beneath your feet a crater of energy that taxed the ingenuity of man for days to harness it and cap down a gas and oil pressure measuring above one thousand pounds per square inch, and flowing oil at a rate equaling about one quarter of the oil production of the whole world. ”

“ A century ago all the world, when Canning called a new world into being to redress the balance of the old, looked to see the economic development of the revolted colonies of Spain and Portugal. Bad as Spanish administration was and relentless as was the censorship of the Inquisition, the printing-presses of Mexico turned out, relative to the mechanic art of the day, better work two hundred years ago than to-day. It is the older pottery of Mexico to which one turns for the far-flung influence of the faïence of Spain fashioned out of the light volcanic clays of Mexico. ”

“ Yet the only army in Europe that has ninety-nine per cent of its soldiers able to read and write supports the right of conquest and territorial expansion. Have not Paris and London within three years been promised as compensation to a fighting people, that they might possess them or hold for ransom? What is the difference when Villa promises loot as compensation to those who will attack under his leadership? Sound government is by character and not by intellect. The redemption of Mexico can never be accomplished by conquest or loot. ”

“ Human beings make Humanity. Under like conditions, all act alike. Give any land and any race a fair chance and it will be as others and not otherwise.
But after old systems, industrial and economic, are undermined and overthrown, this chance can only come by building anew under protected conditions. See how English courts are bringing India closer and closer to self-government. Where would Cuba be but for our aid? Give Mexico protection for order, courts, contracts, industries, and sanitation for a brief space, — one, two, or three decades, and what is this span in the life of a nation? ”

“ Throughout the United States the oil producers and selling agencies boycott the government edict and refuse to cut each other's throats in price competition. The Standard Oil Company can laugh at all Supreme Court decrees. They continue to live under the law which by the same breath demands that they compete and destroy the small man and go to jail for doing it. ”

“ No one realizes what government, or the absence of government, can do for a people until he sees Mexico, in comparison with the United States. Arizona and the Southwest, upon an almost waterless and comparatively barren soil, are prosperous from extensive grazing and minding interests, while Sonora, just across the border, far richer in water and soil and mineral, has slumbered for years, devastated by incursions of Indians from the North, and then rent with internal political dissensions, yet all the while hoping for the morrow to bring forth peace and prosperity. ”

“ AMERICAN INTERESTS NO BASE OF DISORDER The Mexican problem can be studied better at Tampico than elsewhere in Mexico. Here the civilization and business forces of Europe and America have opened the jungle and the prairie, tapped the greatest oil basin in the world, harnessed it, piped it to the Gulf coast, and here light and enlightenment, work and wages, invite human development. Here is the American boom town of Mexico, grown to fifty thousand population, with asphalt-paved streets, business blocks, markets, and parks. ”

“ The fact that the Spanish invader married the Aztec woman is not the curse of Mexico. The curse of Mexico is the faith that might makes right. Every schoolboy has heard the phrase "Conquest of Mexico." The idea of conquests, nationally and individually, is so strongly rooted in the world that Europe is now bathed in blood to uproot it. ”

“ The wide world was full of the rosy belief that, as in the United States and in Europe west of the Vistula, the economic basis of life was visibly rising like a new continent of human cheer and happiness, lifted by the forces of invention, steam power, and individual initiative, so all the world was to rise in like manner and measure. ”

“ Had we deliberately gone about a diabolical scheme to wreck a billion of foreign capital in Mexico, to give forty thousand foreigners over to plunder, and to decree misery, poverty, and sorrow for more than fifteen million Mexicans, we could have conceived of no more effective plan than that which we have executed toward her without ever planning anything against her. ”

“ Land is cheap in Mexico and is to be had almost for the asking, but of what use is an acre or a hundred acres to a peasant without plough, animal power, or machinery, and, above all, without transportation or near-by markets?
In the oil regions of California, rich in soil and markets, the underground wealth is reckoned at just twenty times the value of the soil wealth.
From Tampico to Tuxpan is a tropical jungle but not, as often assumed, a miasmatic marsh. It is a jungle of luxurious foliage over soil that can grow anything in the world ”

“ Doheny is an enthusiast. When he goes into a thing, he is in all over, hands and feet. He will travel longest with the swiftest and the strongest, swim or ride with the youngest, and sleep more or less in any part of the twenty-four hours. He will absorb more and his interest and his sympathies will be of the broadest because his studies and his sympathies reach from the stars of heaven to the lowest mineral deposits and his interest is all the while in humanity and its onward progress. ”

“ The nations must unite and go forward. They must insure development by organization, capital, and modern machinery, which could exist only with courts of justice enforcing laws, order, and contracts. No other route was visible for either national or international peace.
When the demand became emphatic that my articles on Mexico, its oil fields, and its social, political, and economic problems take book form, I naturally turned to Dr. Williams to ask if he would set this forth in a preface with the conclusions he had reached for the problem Mexico presents to-day before the world. ”

“ In time Mexico and the United States also should see it, and demand that government and business cooperate and that Mexico and the United States be mutually helpful.
We have no right to strike down the governments of Mexico one after another and refuse to the government and people financial, business, and political assistance.
The only assistance the people of Mexico have had from the United States has been business assistance in railroad, mining, and oil development. ”

“ WHO SHALL HELP THE ENGULFED PEOPLE?
When you have traveled nearly twenty-five hundred miles by land and water to reach at Cerro Azul the greatest oil well in the world, you see in the jungle only a cleared field, near the center of which is a mound of earth not twenty feet high, set against "mountains of blue," and the only evidence of human interest is an ordinary pressure gauge embedded near the top of this earth mound. ”

“ Coincident with the building of Diesel engine ships must be the establishment of oil supply stations around the globe, so that steamship owners and shipping agents may contract for oil supplies as they now contract for coal.
The Daniels idea of an oil base in California for the United States is an absurdity. What is wanted for our navy is American commercial oil stations. No navy can use oil in amount comparable with the uses of commerce, and only commerce can sustain oil stations around the globe. ”

“ Mexico as a country is not in a state of normal peace, but of normal disorder—disorder that has prevailed more or less for a hundred years, except during the reign of Porfirio Diaz. Correct news reports are not readily available, and the business investor should know his risks, should understand that he cannot be guided by newspaper reports, and should fully understand that Mexican values are selling at large discounts in the world markets, but that in the end they will be properly demonstrated and properly protected by American or European interests, and will some day be properly quoted. ”

“ The future demands not only redemption of the Mexican man of the soil, but the redemption of the American farmer as well.
Agriculture is basal in the world's progress. All industries, in both peace and war, rest upon it. ”

“ America was opened in the desire for mental freedom. Here was born political freedom, destined to encircle the world in little more than a hundred years. Here, too, were struck down the shackles from human hands laboring in slavery. From freedom of hand and mind America must go forward, is going forward, in freedom, with heart pulsating for universal political freedom. ”

“ The United States brought these things to Cuba and see the result, peace and prosperity without annexation and with complete autonomous independence for the Cuban people. Give the Mexican people the same chance, the same opportunity, a like period in which new institutions, new courts, new security, new sanitation come into being, and Mexico will show the same marvel of abounding progress. ”

“ The doctor was explaining to me his remedies for resuscitating the men at Cerro Azul when in the fumes of that gusher the American engineers were working day and night to shut in the torrent of oil, —how as fast as a man began to stagger he was grabbed by the doctor's assistants and quickly dragged away from the well so that the doctor might promptly restore him by gas antidotes, and before he had finished his explanation the two Mexicans had moved a giant hose to the ship's side and the ship was being filled by gravity from a tank on the hill, some fifteen hundred feet away. ”

“ The wealth of the world is planetary wealth until it is lifted by human discovery, human forces, and human hands into human uses. The agricultural wealth of the world giving food to man is from the sun through the soil by labor. The mineral and oil wealth of the world is by human discovery, engineering, machinery, finance, and complex forms of human labor. ”

“ This is the only explanation I can give for the dulled and deaf ears upon which fall the appeals in the name of humanity to give sympathetic aid to the people of Mexico now adrift in political, financial, and social seas with no chart or compass and no directing voice except that of President Wilson, who declares, "They must fight it out among themselves." ”

“ To Doheny, the man of the plain and the mountain, deep and broad delver in Mother Earth, these bones, the life of the past they reveal for man, beast and vegetable life, have the deepest interest; for Doheny seems to have the genius's insight into the history of the past, the meaning of the present, and the hope of the future. ”

“ The position of the Standard Oil Company is exactly that of the big copper producer, the big steel producer, or any other large vendor of a raw article. The producer knows, if he knows anything about business economics, that the advancing price restricts the consumption and a lower price enlarges it. What he wishes is the largest possible distribution consistent with profits. Distribution is governed by the minority and the accumulation of supplies lowering the price which all producers are mutually interested to sustain. ”

“ When the government shakes its finger at the large company and tells it to compete and destroy the smaller companies and decrees aid and comfort to the smaller producing company to destroy the larger one, it makes impossible the competition which under the law it seeks to enforce. ”

“ First, in the south of China, earliest affected by European competition, came the Tai Ping Rebellion, and the new European arms of precision gave the central tyranny of the Manchu a new power. Later, North China broke out in the Boxer revolt, economic in origin. For fifteen years past, the interior has been aflame, rising first where the great rivers bring closer European trade. China is to-day a derelict, a hulk adrift on the ocean of history, where it has weathered so many storms, its industries, two centuries ago giving lessons to Europe, to-day deteriorated or destroyed. ”

“ Yet, aside from the question of order and justice, Mexico is a simple proposition. The national expenses are less than $100,000,000 American gold, yet a little more than half must go to the national defense. The revenues have been but seventy-five per cent of the expenses, and because it never had any credit it never piled up any outside debt. Diaz not only built up Mexican foreign trade from $15,000,000 American gold to $250,000,000, but he built up the national treasury from emptiness to $30,000,000 American gold. ”

“ Boston people put the Mexican Central Railroad into Tampico more than thirty years ago, and between that railroad and the banks of the Panuco River are still the half-naked Mexican babies, the wan mothers, the listless boys and girls, without opportunity, and the fathers without ambition to keep in repair the roofs of their low huts.
A dug-out cedar log for a canoe with a red blanket for a sail is picturesque, but not industrially expansive. The fishing is good, and existence calls for but little energy. ”

“ Barren describes the fashion in which the brief and uncertain economic protection of an American plant has turned the peon into a steady oil-producer, self-directed, in a great and complex plant.
If there are no courts that men can trust, there can be no credits or contracts. If these are not, neither capital nor wages come. ”

“ It does not make any difference in which direction the guns are aimed. Uncle Sam has not a thought about Mexico at the present time; his guns are all aimed for Germany. But for the first time all the Mexican generals and would-be generals know that Uncle Sam has got a gun, has started to load it, and is putting so many millions of men behind it that nobody can now say with safety how much of a squint he may take around the horizon when he gets really fighting mad in the interest of universal peace. ”

“ Every oil producer and every oil seller knows without any argument what he is up against that the Standard Oil Company can sell oil in as large quantities, as well refined, and at as low a price as he can afford and if need be a little lower. ”

“ Doheny not only knows men, but he believes in men of the right sort. T. A. O'Donnell, a director of the Pan-American Oil Company, Doheny declares to be the best oil operator in California. He says he will get twice as much oil out of a well as other operators. When an oil well stops with O'Donnell it is going again in an hour. With some other people an oil well may be going again within two or three days, but the fellow that keeps his oil well going will get the oil, because the oil is all the time flowing toward him. ”

“ War is a tremendous consumer of oil and gasolene and is drawing down the stocks of oil above ground throughout the world. War's demand has doubled the retail price of gasolene this side of the water and multiplied it three-and fourfold on the other side, where it is permitted to be used in peaceful pursuits only to a limited extent and under government regulation. ”

“ When in 1913 all the Americans were called out of Mexico, the native employees of the Mexican Petroleum Company, who had been assisting in the pumping stations and in the shops, saw to it that never a stroke was missed, nor was there a barrel less oil produced, nor any damage or harm to the company's property entrusted entirely to its own faithful Mexican workmen. ”