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CROSS the Atlantic the Belgians faced death that their neutrality should not be violated, and we, to our enduring credit, have given prompt and practical and bountiful evidence of our indorsement of their patriotic effort to preserve treaty integrity; yet here, at our very door, a state of anarchy exists in Mexico, our treaty is broken, our own people are misused, our President flouted, and a problem developed which demands of the Monroe Doctrine an accounting of its stewardship, and which is destined to put the efficacy of that National and valued heirloom to the severest test.

Below our southern border are some ten to fifteen, perhaps twenty, thousand-two years ago it was twice that number—Americans who went there to live and to work under the guarantee of protection bestowed upon them by their citizenship in a friendly and a mighty nation, whose treaty rights have been violated ruthlessly and freely, who have been persecuted, robbed, murdered, without arousing their own Government to duty or their home folks to noticeable commiseration, practical or otherwise.

Not that the home folks lack sympathy; they lack knowledge, correct information, of a distressing and a menacing situation, which has been afforded them neither by their State Department at Washington nor, with rare exceptions, by the press of their country.

Therefore it is with a desire to help to an understanding of the conditions which obtain in Mexico, of the measure of our responsibility, of the immediate outlook, of the hardships to which our fellow men and women are subjected, that this article is presented for consideration, based on long familiarity with Mexico and Mexicans, and after an

especial seven months' journey of observation which began six weeks after the landing of the United States troops at Vera Cruz-April 21, 1914-and which covered, in effect, all of Mexico.

On a small ranch in the State of San Luis Potosí, not far from the Tamaulipas line, lived in the summer of 1913 a man a little past his prime, with his daughter and niece.

From a home in the Middle Western States that had been wrecked by death they had come several years before to this new country, where the land was cheap and the soil rich, and a powerful Government invited and gave adequate guarantee of safe shelter to settlers.

So they had found and invested their all in this acreage, which by now had passed the arduous preparatory stage and was beginning to repay their faithful labor.

From time to time there had been halts in the pioneering, even reverses, but on the whole they had prospered, sufficiently at least to have built an unpretentious though comfortable house and to be able to write their home friends that the world went well with them in the new country. Then came the breaking of the peace which had held and prospered Mexico for thirty years.

The knowledge that men roamed the country round filled with the lust of bloodletting brought lurking anxiety to the little family, but they passed without molestation through the period which preceded the election of Madero, for the soldiers of Porfirio Diaz were not permitted the habit of loot, and the Constitutionalists had not then penetrated to the immediate vicinity of their property.

Quickly followed the early struggles b

tween Huerta and the Constitutionalists, with Villa operating in Chihuahua and Durango, and Carranza in the States of Coahuila and San Luis Potosí.

From time to time the farmer and his womenfolk heard of the marauding sallies of the ill-fed and uncontrolled Carranza troops, but always they found comfort in the feeling that their nationality would commend them to soldiers fighting anywhere to establish constitutional government, and that their birthright under the Stars and Stripes assured their safety beyond peradventure.

Thus on their farm they remained working, wholly trusting in the immunity from harm which they believed their American citizenship gave them, their hearts stirring with patriotic pride at thought of the farreaching benediction of "Old Glory," and with gratitude, too, for every dollar they possessed and their living were represented by that little farm, to abandon which in midseason meant ruin.

One night they were aroused by voices and loud knocking on the door. Accustomed to wayfarers and to offering the best hospitality their little home yielded, the farmer opened the door without hesitation, and admitted a group of soldiers, who instantly set upon and overpowered and rope-bound him before the women scarce realized what was happening.

Then the soldiers overpowered the niece and daughter; and every one of these individuals of the "delicate, sensitive race" with whom President Wilson seeks "spiritual union" had his share in the rape which came after.

All these facts-I withhold names for obvious reasons-were reported to Secretary of State Bryan, who passed them on to the City of Mexico for attention and explanation. Much parleying went on, but not a particle of reparation has to this writing been exacted by the United States Government for the wretched victims or for the flagrant disregard of the treaty rights under which these, its citizens, went to Mexico.

In June, following the success of the Madero revolution, a band of seventeen ex-Maderistas broke into the home of a German cotton-mill workman at Covadonga, State of Puebla. Having tied the German and his helper to a bed, all seventeen of the ex-Maderistas raped the wife in the presence of her husband-after which they bled her to death.

And then the husband and his helper were also killed.

The fiendish deed being reported home by the local Consul in the absence of his Minister, the German Government immediately sent Admiral von Hinze as Minister to Mexico, with instructions, not only to demand punishment for the perpetrators of the savagery, that such punishment might serve as a future deterrent and a protection to his other nationals, advance agents of German trade in Mexico, but also to exact from Mexico an indemnity as further recognition by that Government of its responsibility to Germany under its treaty rights and the rights under which its subjects had gone to Mexico.

The Admiral's activities resulted in the Mexican Government imprisoning fifteen suspected participants on the confession of one of the original seventeen. Meeting, however, with the usual Mexican delays in bringing the men to justice, he requested his Government to send a war-ship to Vera Cruz; and within a few days thereafter procured from the Mexican Government an agreement to pay one hundred thousand marks indemnity.

Two days before the arrival of the warship Bremen it was announced that all fifteen of the culprits had tunneled out of jail at Puebla. Von Hinze at once went to Puebla and satisfied himself that the men had walked out of the front door of the jail. Thereupon he returned to the City of Mexico, informed the Minister of Finance of his discoveries, and told him he had orders from the Kaiser to secure immediate payment of the indemnity agreed upon, and that if it were not paid without delay the Bremen would seize the Vera Cruz custom-house and collect from the port income the one hundred thousand marks plus the expenses of the voyage thither.

The Admiral went out of the office of the Minister of Finance with the one hundred thousand marks in his hand. A few days later five of the escaped men were captured, two being executed at once. And among the first acts of Huerta when he usurped the reins of government was to shoot the remaining three.

Albert Hoskins, an American, was the doctor of the Monte del Real Mining Company at Pachuca, in the State of Hidalgo, and held also a first lieutenant's commission in the medical corps of the United States army.

While making the rounds of the company's ailing, one day in the early spring of 1914, he was arrested by the local jefe, charged with being an American spy, and literally flung into a small room having neither bed nor blankets. When he asked for blankets, the officer ordered in buckets of cold water, which were emptied over the dirt floor with the remark that such was the kind of covering for a gringo.

In such quarters, offered repeated in dignity, if not brutality, and given barely food enough to escape actual starving, Hoskins was held for three days. Then he was marched through the streets of Pachuca between guards, jeered and mud-pelted by the increasingly uncontrolled crowd, all the way to the railway station and to the Mexico City train.

Arrived in Mexico City, he was again paraded for his own humiliation and the entertainment of the populace-which even when uninspired by animus dearly loves such diversion-and jailed a second time.

Several days later, when the falsity of the trumped-up charge had become too evident to present even the flimsiest excuse for holding him longer, he was taken by train to Soledad, a small town about twenty miles from Vera Cruz, and turned loose.

Beyond lodging a protest with its rep resentative in Mexico, no action was taken in the premises by the United States Gov

ernment.

In the outskirts of Tampico, an American, Nichols by name, owned and personally conducted a dairy, delivering his products in town, where he had built up quite a nice little business.

During the latter part of the Taft Administration he had been annoyed by rather bold attempts at robbery, and had grown to nightwatching his cow-barn.

One night he surprised a Mexican breaking in, and, though he was able to secure a good look at him, the man got away.

The next day Nichols entered a complaint in Tampico, and was told by the officer that, while he could not spare men to make the arrest, he would give the American such an order if he so desired. So Nichols went home from headquarters with an official order of arrest for the man he had so nearly caught the night before.

Within the day he found his man, but while bringing him to town in the night the

Mexican succeeded in eluding Nichols, who fired into the dark after him, and then continued on to town to report the escape. Destiny directed the bullet. The next day the Mexican was found dead not many yards from where Nichols had caught a last glimpse of him as he disappeared from view.

Nichols was arrested without opportunity to notify his family or Consul, held incommunicado, and treated with unwarranted harshness; in a word—an unpleasant word for which I apologize-he was confined in the common urinal of the jail. Those acquainted with the unsanitary conditions prevalent in Mexico will realize the misery and the danger of such a cell.

The American Consul, when he became aware of Nichols's plight, was unable, through official representations to the local authorities, to ease the milkman's situation. Meantime, while representations" continued making, the natural happened; the prisoner fell ill of fever contracted in the noisome hole in which his Government permitted him to remain.

And now the Consul sought to have the very sick man removed to a hospital, and, denied such permission at Tampico, brought the matter to the attention of the American Ambassador, Henry Lane Wilson, at Mexico City.

Whatever errors Mr. Wilson may have subsequently committed, indifference to the unjust treatment of his fellow-countrymen was never among them. At once he took up the case with the Governor of Tamaulipas, and, failing to obtain from that worthy the authority to have Nichols transferred to a hospital, went direct to President Madero, to whom he vigorously presented a statement of the cruelty and injustice to which the man was subjected. But Madero was as indifferent as his Governor.

At this stage in the endeavor to get a square deal for his compatriot, Mr. Wilson, revealing intimate knowledge of the Mexican character, asked his Government for a war-ship, and the Chester was ordered to Tampico. With the Chester in port, the Ambassador again waited upon Madero and demanded that Nichols be removed to a hospital. And Nichols was forthwith removed to a hospital, and, when luckily he had recovered, given the fair trial to which he was entitled.

This was Francisco I. Madero, the same Madero in whose favor the United States had

permitted gross and frequent violation of our neutrality laws when he rebelled against the Diaz Government; the same Madero whom the United States had again favored by preventing arms to get across the border to Orozco, thus killing the effort of that redhanded leader to unseat his chief.

In the second week or thereabouts of last December (1914) two Englishmen were set upon and murdered by some Mexicans at their mine near Nacozari, in the northern part of the State of Sonora.

The case was taken up instantly and vigorously by England through its Consul at Douglas, Arizona, the nearest post of a British representative, and within two weeks two of the murderers had been arrested by the Mexican authorities and shot.

In northern Chihuahua last November (1914) three Americans were waylaid by a party of so-called Mexican "bandits," shot, then tied to horses, and dragged until dead, as their recovered mutilated bodies showed only too clearly.

As I say, the mutilated bodies, piteously eloquent of the atrocity, have been recovered; but official United States action thus far is described by the announcement from Washington that "the case has been reported to the State Department."

During almost the entire period between January, 1914, and the middle of the succeeding May, while the Constitutionalists struggled to capture the port of Tampico from the Federals, roving bands and guerrilla warfare infested the entire region thereabout, endangering American life and millions of dollars of American and English oil property.

The Americans appealed to their Government to warn the Mexicans of this hazard to foreign life and property, urging that the actual oil-fields be declared a neutral zone, for the good and sufficient reasons: (1) that they were from ten to fifty and more miles from the city and port where the rival armies were in veritable contact; (2) that the storage tanks, so easily destroyed, alone represented hundreds of thousands of dollars; and (3) that the firing of a well by one of the many badly directed shrapnel shells would accomplish its complete ruin.

It was a vain appeal. The indecisive skirmishing went on; swirled and zigzagged whither it listed, undiminished, unrestrained;

and when at length the Federals walked out and General Pablo Gonzales and his Constitutionalists walked in and the city was officially "taken," the foreigners reckoned their losses to a very considerable sum in cattle, horses, warehouses, and oil.

About a year later, or, to be exact, in midJanuary, 1915, Venustiano Carranza, with his "headquarters" at Vera Cruz and his office in the lighthouse at the open seaway—pursuing to the last the plundering, obstructionist habit he has made so familiar and so notorious since his first coming to Mexico City in the summer of 1914-put an embargo on the oil exports of an American and of a British owned company, because they refused to pay his extortionate tax, and threatened, in addition, to confiscate the plant of the latter.

The British Ambassador at Washington at once "made urgent representations to the State Department," and the next day Secretary Bryan announced through the press that the United States Government had notified Carranza that "serious consequences may follow" his threatened action against foreign-owned oil plants at Tampico.

And the oil companies forthwith proceeded to do business.

Now, the purpose of this distressing and wholly unprejudiced recital-taken from a full note-book of such things-is by no means only to lift into view the obstacles put in the way of legitimate business in Mexico, or to uncover the horrors, of which there have been a sickening many, that have fallen upon foreign men and women in that country, but to illustrate the difference in attitude towards their nationals by Great Britain, Germany, and the United States, the practical results of their respective methods, and the influence of those respective methods upon native regard for and conduct towards the respective nationals of the said great Powers.

And it is the last-viz., the rôle a country plays in establishing a respected status for its nationals—that I wish especially to emphasize as most germane to the situation in which Americans now living in Mexico find themselves, and the one which not only explains much of what has happened to our countrymen and countrywomen in Mexico, but also accounts for the new and contemptuous pose of Mexico towards the United States.

The practical result of England's wellknown consideration for her subjects abroad invites respect for the Briton wherever he

goes, as much on account of wholesome fear of his Government as for esteem of himself. That he or the Frenchman or the German has endured in dignities in the recent history of Mexico is because the United States, under the Monroe Doctrine, has taken from these : reigners the free hand of their own governments and even in return but slightly better protection than to its own citizens. The United States has neither protected them nor allowed them to protect themselves. Such a condition is of course as intolerable as it is unfair and hostile, and one day the Adminis tration at Washington will hear that we must either live up to the self-imposed responsiblllties of this Monroe Doctrine or shelve it.

No demonstration against her subjects or boycott of her manufactures followed Germany's austerity, apropos of Covadonga, because the Kaiser's action implied strength and determination that Mexico should comply with Ler treaty obligations, and thereby impressed the necessity for respect upon the general Mexican mind-as the collective mind of a partially developed people must invanably be pressed if peaceful, equitable relations are to prevail. It is a-b-c to every man of experience that among a more or less primitive or half-civilized people, such as the Mexicans are to within almost seven-eighths of their total number, you must dominate, always justly and without a waver, or you must get out of the country.

Maintenance of native respect for the foreign workers among them is indispensably essential to advance in educati », to material welfare for the natives, or to safety for the foreigners, as well as to reciprocal and desirable trade relations with the respective gov

ernments.

No new foreman, foreign or native, ever went on the job in Mexico but had his ** savvy ̈—fitness conveys the nearest thought his discipline, and his courage well tried out by his gang; and no man ever adventured successfully into the wilderness with an expedition of natives without early making good his title to lead them. It is the instinctive recognition of racial superiority from the half to the fully developed folk that they serve whom they respect; and they respect what they fear; and they fear only the latent retributive force.

The Germans to-day are probably the most popular of foreigners with native Mexico; they come and go when they will tney even paraded in anti-American dem. n

strations in Guadalajara la they are extending their trade, or rather were before the War. When the audadela (chadel in Mexion City was seized by Fox Diaz in February, 1913. and these fearsome ten days of fighting in the city began between him and Huerta, bringing death to six seven hundred soldiers and over three thousand non-combatants, the majority of them women, as well as destruction to many buildings on and outside the ostensible line of fire, the family of President Madero sought asylum in German Legation.

Germans in Mexico enjoy the prestige their Kaiser has established through exacting of Mexico compliance with her treaty: they enjoy immunity from bushwhacking and persecution because Germany has demonstrated that she will not allow it, that she will pro tect her subjects who are pursuing their legitimate vocations in Mexico under certam definite treaty rights: they go about their affairs unmolested because they ormmand the respect which every one, high or low, civilized or uncivilized. has for the man wh› is strong in his right.

Americans are living, doing business, in Mexico under similar and equal treaty rights: but they do not enjoy a like immunity and respect, for the sole reason that their Government has failed to exact it. Americans kr. this to be due to a strange, preconceived notion on the part of their President as t the Mexican character and conditions of the country-a notion entirely unsupported by evidence and because et his stubb rn effort to raise an ideal which is impracticable and would be literally harmful in the present state of the unawasened Mexican conscience.

But the Mexicans think and say it is because we fear them.

And that is the very nub of our trou e in

Mexic, which has brought intamus injus

tice to our nationds, which has kept and is keeping us on the edge of arme i intervention, and which will continue, despite official assurances to the contrary and a pers na envoy from the President fresh every month. to keep us in the same state and at the same 1.sk in Mexico until the United States Government reassumes its responsibility, temporary shirked by the present Administration, and exacts of Mexico fulfilment of bur treats promises, the full protection of American lite, and the right to legitimate trade tree tr m disingenuous, harassing, and unfair levies oi the Carranza brand.