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touch with us, and the commerce of this Western Hemisphere will brood over Central America.

"What we desire to do, and what we shall do, is to show our neighbors to the south of us that their interests are identical with our interests; that we have no plans or any thoughts of our own exaltation, but have in view only the peace and the prosperity of the people in our hemisphere."

The little clock on the bookcase struck nine. The President rose. He walked down the stairs with me, and took his hat to go across to his office, where there was to be a conference on the vexing situation in Colorado. As we parted at the end of the corridor he held out his hand and said:

"It will be a great thing not only to have helped humanity by restoring order, but to have gone further than that by laying the secure foundations for that liberty without which there can be no happiness."

(2) THE PRESIDENT'S MEXICAN POLICY-PRESENTED IN AN AUTHORIZED INTERVIEW BY SECRETARY OF THE INTERIOR FRANKLIN K. LANE, JULY 16, 1916

"President Wilson's Mexican policy is one of the things of which, as a member of his administration, I am most proud. It shows so well his abounding faith in humanity, his profound philosophy of democracy, and his unshakable belief in the ultimate triumph of liberty, justice, and right. He has never sought the easy solution of any of the difficult questions that have arisen in the last three years. He has always sought the right solution.

"Mr. Wilson's Mexican policy has not been weak and vacillating. It has been definite and consistent, firm and constructive. How firm is already known to those who have sought to force American intervention in Mexico; how constructive will best be appreciated fifty years from now by the whole world. It was to Mexico perhaps more than to anything that the President referred the other day when he said that he was playing for the verdict of mankind.

"The policy of the United States toward Mexico is a policy of hope and of helpfulness; it is a policy of Mexico for the Mexicans. That, after all, is the traditional policy of this country-it is the policy that drove Maximilian out of Mexico."

Secretary of the Interior Lane made this statement to me at his summer camp on the shores of Lake Champlain, and then he launched out into a forceful declaration of the principles underlying President Wilson's Mexican policy and proceeded to give the reasons for his conviction that the President was right when he refused to recognize Huerta, and declared that the murderer of Madero must go, right when he occupied the port of Vera Cruz, right when he accepted the offer of mediation extended by the A B C, right when he abided by the agreement reached at Niagara Falls, right when he withdrew from Vera Cruz, right when he recognized Carranza as head of the de facto Government, and right when he sent the United States Army into Mexico after the bandit raid on Columbus. Mr. Lane said:

"The doctrine of force is always fighting with the doctrine of sympathy, and the trouble with the two schools of warism and pacifism is that neither one will recognize that both philosophies have a part to play in the life of every individual and of every nation and in

the production and advancement of that strange thing we call civilization.

"Now, the doctrine of force has been worked to its limit in Mexico. President Wilson believes that the doctrine of sympathy should have its chance in that country and this is the foundation of his Mexican policy. Not that Mexico wants our sympathy. It does not-and that is one of the great difficulties we have to contend with. Another is that it takes a long while to make a Mexican believe that we intend his country good and not evil. The people of Mexico have inherited the pride of Aragon, and the thing above all others that they do not want and will not stand for is that kind of sympathy which is nothing but pity.

"The sympathy that Mexico needs is the sympathy of understanding. The United States should be what the Latin Americans call 'muy simpático.' We have no exact English equivalent for that expression, but if there is one thing it does not mean it is sympathy as we Americans use the word. Uncle Sam will be 'muy simpático' to the Mexican people only when he has a conscientious regard for and realization of the feelings and the desires of the Mexican and understands his best side, his aspiring nature.

"Mexico is a bad neighbor now. There is no use in denying this. We live at peace with Canada on our northern border, without a soldier along 3,000 miles of land, while, as a matter of necessity, we are obliged to keep an armed force on our Mexican border all of the time, and have now gathered there the largest army assembled in the United States since the Civil War. The superficial reason for this is that Mexico cannot settle her own troubles at home and that the de facto government has been unable to prevent bandits from harassing us.

"Our neighbor's sewage is running over into our lot, and we must find some way to stop it even if we have to go over the boundary line and stop the pipes ourselves. This is the easiest thing in the world. to say, but to respect the letter of the law and at the same time abate a nuisance that is not on your own property is one of the most difficult things in the world.

"Mexico will always be a nuisance to us until a few fundamental reforms are put into effect there. If it is to be lasting, however, someone inside of Mexico must do it. It cannot be done by us unless we are prepared not only to conquer Mexico but to annex Mexico. We should not only have to make war on Mexico and impose peace by force, but after giving it a preliminary cleaning up we should have to establish and maintain indefinitely a government there."

I asked Secretary Lane to go over the history of the past six years in Mexico with me and to tell the World the reasons which had governed the policy and actions of the United States Government as each emergency arose. In complying with this request Mr. Lane said:

"Diaz was a great man, a very great man. I doubt if, with the possible exception of Bismarck, there was a greater man alive in his day. After the Czar of Russia he was the most absolute despot of modern times. He built a monument to himself, which I believe is still standing, to celebrate thirty years of peace in Mexico, and all the nations of the earth sent representatives to its unveiling. Within two years he was an exile because that monument represented order alone and the aspirations of only a very small portion of his people.

"The peace that he had maintained was an imposed peace not coming from the people themselves. Diaz ruled by fear. He had gone into office with promises upon his lips, and I am willing to believe that he meant to keep them. But once in power he was appalled by the span of years necessary for the slow process of constructive civilization, and he determined that to gain time Mexico was to be saved by two things, force and wealth.

"And so, while observing to some extent the letter of the constitution he cynically avoided its spirit. He always placed property rights before human rights. Although he sought to improve, and did improve, Mexico's material condition it was without even so much as a thought of her moral progress. He kept the masses of the people in subjection by keeping them in ignorance. When he died eighty-three per cent of the people could neither read nor write, and as far as her political development went, Mexico was no further forward and no more fitted for self-government than in 1821, when, having wrested her independence from Spain, she was first recognized as a sovereign nation by the United States.

"During Diaz's time I had a very interesting talk with a great lawyer in Mexico City who was an officeholder in the Diaz régime. I asked him the current question: 'After Diaz, what?' To my surprise the man said: 'I am a Constitutionalist. Either before Diaz dies or immediately upon his death a revolution will break out in Mexico having for its purpose three things-the restoration of the land to the people, the establishment of public schools throughout the country, and a judicial system in which the courts will decide according to law and not according to executive desires.

"The Madero revolution followed exactly on these lines, but Madero was a dreamer, an idealist, a man who took his constitution seriously and who failed for two reasons, or rather because of two

weaknesses of his own character. He was not strong enough to suppress the rapacious rascals who surrounded him, and he was not practical enough to deliver the goods that he had promised. Men in Madero's own government saw in his revolution only another opportunity for getting rich quick, and they ruined him while he was still dreaming.

"Huerta was his commander-in-chief, a soldier trained by Diaz and dominated by Diaz's friends. He, too, believed in saving Mexico by force and wealth; he was in complete sympathy with the philosophy expressed in the Diaz administration. There is no truth in the oftrepeated allegation that all the trouble with Mexico would have been avoided if President Wilson had recognized Huerta. I ask anyone who wishes to be fair to this administration to look back three years and read the newspapers of that day and the debates in Congress in which the murder of Madero and Suarez was denounced.

"Had we recognized Huerta or had we not taken a positive stand against him, the criticism this administration has received for the policy we have pursued would be as nothing to what would now overwhelm us. Who were the American statesmen who demanded Huerta's recognition? What one of our leaders of either party set forth the principles upon which a better feeling between this country and all of our sister Republics of the South could be stimulated by taking a position that was abhorrent to our American conscience?

"We know what we have suffered in the past three years, and it is too easy now to say that all this would have been avoided if Huerta had been recognized, but the only demand made at that time by the more solid of our men of affairs who were antagonistic to the administration's policy was that we should intervene; that we should bring order to Mexico by force.

"No one then believed and no one really believes now that the recognition of Huerta would have solved the Mexican problem. We do know, however, one thing that we were not conscious of then, that Huerta himself had so slight a hold upon Mexico that he did not dare to leave the capital and that he was to all intents and purposes a prisoner of the reactionaries, able only to reach the sea at its nearest point.

"Although it is self-evident that this country, as the champion of constitutional government in America, can never recognize a military despotism based upon assassination, it is not necessary to call Huerta an assassin in order to justify our refusal to recognize him. His attempted dictatorship was but a fiction of government. With the elected President and Vice-President murdered and the minister of

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