Thomas Edward Gibbon

“ Bulnes, in explaining the causes which have led to Mexico's utter failure in self-government, says:
"Unfortunately, it is a fact that the ideal of the middle-class family is to be part of this bureaucracy and that the ideal of the bureaucracy is to rob the union and individuals whenever possible. The mother is no longer the just matron who shed the radiance of her virtue over the home and reared men for God, country and humanity. In these days there are mothers who urge their husbands, sons, sons-in-law, and brothers to steal from their country. ”

“ If, as a people, we feel that we have no right to interfere to protect the vast majority of the Mexican people from the long agony inflicted upon them by a minority of their countrymen, surely we have the right to intervene to protect our own citizens against the same criminal minority. ”

“ So bitterly did the citizens of the border states resent the failure of President Taft's administration to protect the rights of American citizens that the National Democratic Convention of 1912 included in its platform the following plank drafted by a delegate from El Paso:
"The constitutional rights of American citizens should protect them on our borders and go with them throughout the world, and every American citizen residing or having property in any foreign country is entitled to and must be given the full protection of the United States Government, both for himself and his property." ”

“ I have had some opportunity of observing an irrigation enterprise carried out during the past fifteen years by American capital. Here by utilizing the waters of a river, nearly a hundred thousand acres of arid land, which previously had never produced a dollar, has been made to yield great crops of cotton and forage. This one enterprise alone has added millions in value to the permanent taxable property of Mexico and it is to-day paying taxes to the extent of more than a hundred and fifty thousand dollars annually to the territorial government in which the land is situated. ”

“ Mexico City wears an awful aspect and the awfulness is accentuated by the contrast between the dark, filthy patios, in which the starving peons huddle and the palaces built by the 'Cientificos' of the Diaz régime where the Carrancista officials now hold obscene orgy. Carranza himself has chosen the magnificent residence at 95 Paseo de la Reforma as his private residence. Each general has his own picked troop to guard his residence and a military band to entertain him. ”

“ Government has always meant merely an organized system of robbery and exploitation. It gave the people nothing, it took everything the people had. It taxed them in the most ruthless ways; it spent the taxes for private purposes and profit. ”

“ During this period Diaz, for the first time in the experience of Mexico as a democracy, brought order, tranquillity, and a fair amount of honesty into the administration of its governmental affairs. He addressed himself earnestly to the material development of his country and, whatever may be thought of the character of the structure that he reared, there can be no doubt that during his term of power he showed that he was a constructive statesman of great ability — a type of strong, original, and effective character rarely produced by any country oftener than once in a century or more. ”

“ The experience of the masses of the people under the government given the major portion of Mexico by the Carranza party furnishes a striking parallel to that of the Russians at the hands of the Bolsheviki. In every country there exists a predatory element whose chief ambition it is to secure control of the machinery of government by violence and then to use it in depriving industrious, frugal people of the property they have accumulated, and dividing it among themselves. ”

“ The fact is that the Latin-Mexican element which at all times has been in control of the government and which, until foreigners became interested and developed valuable properties there under the encouragement of the Diaz regime had busied themselves in using a hundred revolutionary movements to confiscate the property of each other has found that to-day the properties most valuable and which, therefore, appeal most to its lawless greed, are those built up by the intelligence, enterprise and industry of foreigners. ”

“ While generals of the army are permitted to rob the public funds and pursue a career of shameless dissipation and extravagance, the employees of the railroads have their wages reduced; the school teachers remain without their pay and are forced to resign their positions by thousands; the civil employees of the government are dismissed and departments closed while important business remains unattended to. The country is filled with beggars, and people are dying by the thousands for lack of the necessities of life. ”

“ No people can effectively participate in government unless they are endowed with a cultivated intelligence enabling them to arrive at informed opinions. In order that participation of the majority in the government of a democracy may be effective, the masses must be educated. In the last analysis, the chance that Mexico will ever have a government that will insure the prosperity and happiness of its citizens depends upon the capacity of the majority of its people, and that means the great peon class, to receive and profit by education. ”

“ The Americans who went into Mexico upon the invitation of the government and played a great part in promoting the country's economic welfare are exactly the same sort of Americans who by the tens of thousands have within the past two decades emigrated to the wheat lands of Western Canada. These men, confident of the sort of government that they would be given by the Anglo-Saxon race became citizens of Canada and for more than four years fought the battles of their adopted country on the western front as a part of the Canadian troops who have made such glorious history. ”

“ The foreign company which has acquired oil properties in California sells some of its products in this country and ships quantities of it to other markets, while all the profits of the operation, of course, go to the stockholders abroad. Yet, any citizen of the United States who would complain that the Shell Oil Company has done a deadly wrong by acquiring and exploiting oil lands in this country, and should demand therefore, that its property be confiscated, would be regarded as either a lunatic or a criminal. ”

“ As the result of careful investigation and observation, I hope and believe that if the descendants of the aboriginal Indians of Mexico should ever have accorded to them a full and free opportunity for intellectual and moral improvement, they may be made an element in the citizenship upon which a successful democracy may be founded; but I am forced to the conclusion that, so long as the Latin element is in power, this opportunity will never be conceded to the majority race. ”

“ Very much the larger number of them represented a character of mining which the Mexicans would not, and could not, have pursued because they had not the initiative, the capital, or the engineering knowledge required. Whatever wealth was taken out of them by the foreigners would never have been accessible to the Mexicans. The employment of tens of thousands of natives and the distribution of much money in the form of wages, cost of food stuffs, and so forth, represented just so much economic value which would never have been acquired save for the investment of foreign capital and intelligence. ”

“ And, if one may continue the simile, our Government has been playing a game with the cards marked against it, for we have practised the diplomacy of an honest, moral people, while the Mexicans have shown that disregard for every diplomatic agreement and every obligation under international law which should have been expected from the Latin-Mexican element, which has earned the reputation of being the most congenitally dishonest and immoral race in the world to-day. ”

“ That the Carranza party has been permitted to carry on without restraint its lawless dealings with the persons and properties of all foreigners in Mexico, except the citizens of Germany, must be accepted as one of the results of the great war; but, in view of the failure of our own Government, during eight years' revolutionary activity in Mexico, to furnish any protection worthy of the name to the persons and property rights of Americans in that country, we probably cannot claim that the war has had any effect upon the treatment of American citizens there. ”

“ The powers now in control in Mexico, in gratifying their greedy desire for property created by the foreigner, have so destroyed the prosperity of their country that thousands of their people within the past five years have died of starvation, other thousands are on the brink of destruction, and the credit of their country is so low that they are unable to raise a dollar by public loans. ”

“ So numerous and so great are the accumulated evils resulting from the contests for power and pelf, which various leaders have waged for eight years, that it is no exaggeration to say that the closing years of the first century of Mexico's experiment in self-government finds the masses of her people more hopelessly wretched than they have ever been during that long period, while the country is now under the control of elements which give no promise of future betterment. ”

“ When it is recalled that the population of Mexico was much more dense than that of California when gold was discovered and that for three hundred years the people had been engaged in gold and silver mining, and the development of that industry had been stimulated by the urgent demands of the mother country for the payment of tribute in these precious metals, it will be seen that the probability of the exhaustion of the easily accessible deposits after three hundred years was very great, and that these deposits were so exhausted everyone familiar with the history of mining in Mexico knows. ”

“ All changes in land holding have been temporary and no continuing good has been accomplished. This would appear to indicate that no permanent relief of agrarian troubles can be obtained by dividing the land among a labouring class without education or means, which has for centuries been accustomed to working as employees of the property-owning class, with no experience in the control of its own labour in independent industry, and to suggest that some other and more deeply seated cause is responsible for Mexico's utter failure in her attempt at self-government. ”

“ This success of the foreign owner, while producing some profit to him, has necessarily been of great economic value to the people and nation, because it has furnished employment for labour at rates in every instance greater than the Latin-Mexican landowner paid; it has increased by millions the taxable property of the country; and it has afforded an object lesson in improved methods of management and cultivation which should have been of great value to the people of the country. ”

“ Surely no further proof should be needed of the fact that Carranza and his followers have, from the very beginning, been inspired by a spirit of lawless aggression in their dealings with Americans and the citizens of our allies, England and France, which has led them to violate every principle of international law which is supposed to govern the conduct of a country toward the nationals of other countries. ”

“ In order to justify their dishonest invasion of the rights of foreigners who made investments in Mexico previous to and during the Diaz period, the Carrancistas have assumed the attitude that foreigners who financed the construction of railroads, either by buying the bonds of the nation issued to secure the cash subsidies granted or by supplying the additional cost committed a great wrong against their country. Certainly no one will undertake to argue that the railroads are not a valuable economic asset to the country. ”

“ The American farmers who composed these little centres of agricultural industry and prosperity were in no sense exploiters of Mexico under concessions granted by the Diaz government, for they had purchased the land upon which they built their homes and depended upon their own industry, economy, and enterprise for the prosperity which they had achieved, and not upon any advantage secured by concessions, or privileges of any kind granted by the Mexican Government. ”

“ Previous to the Diaz era the Mexican people were chiefly engaged in farming and stock raising, only to a limited extent in mining, and hardly at all in manufacturing industries. The looting and confiscation, always a conspicuous feature of revolutionary activities, therefore, affected but little the daily life of the common people because they produced all the food they needed; and the population being very much less than it now is, starvation, or even hunger, did not often result from these frequent disturbances. ”

“ As members, then, of a community which must shortly be the subject of inquiry of the chanceries of the world, our duty is to help our government in its tasks and to speak frankly, for the day of reckoning is upon us and we must avoid malicious deceptions and futile excuses which can only place our country in a humiliating position. It is preferable to fall face forward than to drop on our knees in suppliant tone. ”

“ That people of the character of the native races of Mexico as described by historians should now be represented after four hundred years by those whom travellers know as the ignorant and often brutalized peons, would seem incredible were it not that the world has had such terrible and pitiful examples of the power of injustice, wrong, and oppression to produce racial disintegration and degradation. ”

“ Mexico City is full of starving Indians, insufficiently clad and with no shelter to protect themselves at night to escape the icy winds that sweep down from the encircled snow-clad mountains when the sun goes down. ”

“ No one who is at all acquainted with the character of the men who have come into office under Carranza can for a moment suppose that the great majority of them will neglect such an opportunity for robbing the foreign owners of mining and petroleum properties either by arbitrarily taking from them the larger or more valuable part of their holdings or by extorting money from them by threats of exercising this power. ”

“ The evidence of Mexican history, during the four hundred years in which that country has been controlled by an alien minority race, corroborated by the example of every other country in which similar conditions have existed, admits of but one conclusion; namely, that the ultimate salvation of Mexico depends upon its majority race being elevated and improved by a broad and effective scheme of popular education, and also by a chance for the betterment of its economic condition, which can only be afforded by an honest and efficient administration of its government. ”

“ Never before has the government not only permitted, but encouraged and participated in, the lawless confiscation of private property to the extent that has characterized the course of the Carranza administration. Not for twenty-five years has employment been so uncertain and wages so low as at the present time. During the last five years many thousands have died from starvation and the bad sanitary conditions that have resulted from the poor government, or lack of government, of the centres of population. ”

“ The industrious Scandinavian peoples, who settled the great Northwest, and made their homes upon land acquired for a very small part of its actual value from the Government, and who are to-day the most responsible factors in the prosperity of states like Minnesota and Wisconsin, rendered the same service to this country that the industrious Americans who settled in a number of agricultural colonies and made their homes and developed lands there rendered to Mexico. ”

“ That right we have abrogated for nearly eight years, but there is yet time to accomplish a great deal that justice, to speak nothing of humanitarianism, would appear to call for if we would cease to expect at the hands of the dominant class of Mexico the justice for the masses which we humanely desire, and insist upon the sort of government which the rights of our citizens demand. ”