hard. Let us shorten it as much as possible by marching straight.

* * *

Just a Poland, hedged in by three greedy empires and inhabited by a people more artistic than commercial, has been repeatedly the prey of the invader, so has it been and is with Mexico. She stands between the money-making North and the seductively alluring and almost virgin resources of the tropical El Dorando. Used for generations to free commercial access to land, wood and water, her people have adapted themselves to their climate and taken life easy. They have none of the long industrial training and discipline back of us; none of that commercial astuteness our highly artificial life has forced us to develop. All they can oppose to the roaring tide of a commercialism which threatens to engulf them is the rocky barrier of an Indian temperament which is tenacity incarnate; which has clung for centuries to simple ways of life that suit it; which has simple but most decided ideas of right and wrong; which regards the tax-gatherers as robbers; which hates the centralized government that renders collection of rend and taxes possible; which wishes to work for itself at tasks satisfactory to itself; which abhors, above everything else, the military regime which forces it to fight on behalf of a patriotism in which it does not believe. A race at once communistic and individualistic. People who will take in free exchange all the labor-saving machinery we can supply, since they wish to save themselves all trouble possible; but who do not take at all to the idea of working that machinery in factories to profit others.