Mexico of the Mexicans/Chapter XV
CHAPTER XV
MEXICO OF TO-MORROW
It is fashionable in some quarters, when the subject of the future of Latin-America is discussed, to adopt an air of profound pessimism. It is surprising to encounter men of experience, who, in dealing with such questions, adopt the attitude that progress among certain races is impossible, and that to expect advance—social, political, or commercial—in regard to them is to expect the incredible. Yet the lessons of race-history do not teach us such counsels of despair. Many great nations have lapsed into barbarism or else been totally forgotten, whilst others have risen from the most negligible beginnings to a place in the forefront of the world's activities. There is nothing in the geographical position or natural resources of Mexico which would lead us to the conclusion that one day, when her national evolution is complete, that she will not be able to take her place side by side with the most favoured countries. Nor is there anything in the type or constitution of the race which inhabits her soil which unfits them for a great destiny. Those who criticise the peoples of Latin-America are usually those who understand them least. At present, taking them all in all, they are in some respects an adolescent people. Moreover, they are a highly composite people; and what race, it may be asked, has been enabled to justify itself before it had reached that stage in its evolution when the various stocks of which it was composed had been welded into ethnic unity? Certainly not the Anglo-Saxon race, which does not appear as a European power of any magnitude until the beginning of the sixteenth century—precisely the epoch at which Mexico was discovered.
It cannot be too strongly insisted upon that the two races which, for the most part, go to make up the Mexican people, are stocks which have behind them a great record of human endeavour. It is unnecessary in this place to dwell upon the question of what Spain has done for the world at large. As a great Spanish statesman has pointed out, Spain by damming back the conquering Moslem flood, sacrificed herself for Europe, which might otherwise have suffered from the retrograde influence of the conquering East. The story of aboriginal Mexico is not so familiar to British readers; but nowhere on the American continent had such a high standard of human progress been achieved as in the Valley of Anahuac, the civilisation of which was self-evolved, and, unlike the cultures of Europe, owed nothing to other sources.
That Mexico is slowly recovering her poise, or rather that she is organising herself for the first time, is vouched for by the fact that order has been restored in Proofs of
Recovery.thirteen out of her twenty-seven States, that prohibition has been put into effect in several States, and that free schools have been established in scores of places where education was before unheard of. In Yucatan, for example, there are at present 2,400 teachers where, under the Diaz regime, there were but 200. In a number of the remaining fourteen States, a beginning of order has been made, the worst conditions prevailing in the State of Morelos, to the immediate south of the Mexican Federal district, where Zapata is still in control, and in the northern frontier State of Chihuahua, where conditions are unsettled on account of the presence of American troops. But law and order are surely beginning to prevail. In several States there is already provision for the equitable division of the great estates into smaller holdings; and arrangements are being made by the various State legislatures for just systems of taxation, and the New England system of co-operative welfare is being widely established.
Intervention in Mexican affairs on the part of the United States would be far more uncalled for than the unwarranted intervention of Austria in Serbian home politics. It would destroy the moral prestige of America among the nations, which would undoubtedly regard American interference as a return to the policy which ”Leave Mexico
Alone”.tore Texas and California from the bleeding side of the Isthmian Republic. The United States has a treaty with Mexico which provides that all differences shall be referred to arbitration. This treaty cannot be made a "scrap of paper" of, without grave results to the credit of the more powerful disputant. The end and aim of the United States in a policy of intervention could only be one of two things: to annex Mexico, or to place once more upon her shoulders the ancient incubus of slavery from which she has struggled so valiantly to free herself. The genius of the Mexican people will suffice to restore the equilibrium of their commonwealth, or rather to endow it with an equilibrium which, under the régime of crafty and self-seeking dictators, it never possessed. Leave Mexico alone! Give her the opportunity—the common right—of arriving in her own way at a settlement of her own affairs, so long as no flagrant injury is done to neighbouring interests. Such injury as is done is nearly always effected by the reactionaries, the clericos, the Cientificos, the concessionaries, and other vultures who represent the plundering interest, and who throng the frontier town of El Paso, awaiting the signal to swoop on the land which once they ruled and from which they have been justly exiled.
Those who have endured so long and so patiently, who have struggled so valiantly for freedom, must endure and struggle a little longer. That they will do so is certain; for Mexico has always had, and still has, patriots of the most disinterested type, if these have been of widely conflicting aims. As the historian casts his eyes down the varied past of this wonderful land, a circumstance which cannot fail to arrest his interest and inspire his imagination is the quality, the calibre of the men who have lived and died for Mexico, and who, in most cases, have given their lives ungrudgingly in the hope that their blood would benefit the country of their birth or adoption. The lion-like Guatemotzin, last monarch of the Aztecs; the valiant priest Hidalgo; Rayon; Morelos; Mina; the brave Iturbide; the unfortunate Maximilian; the brilliant Mexia; Juarez; Lerdo; Madero—surely no other land on earth can display such a roll of sacrificial patriotism! Each in his own way, although treading in widely different paths, helped to mould Mexico into a nation: some with a personal incentive, others by reason of a purer and more patriotic instinct, but none wholly without the good of the country at heart. Were all the pains, the struggles, the Herculean labours of those gigantic figures in vain the mere contortions of Titans imprisoned in an Ætna seething with eternal political unrest? No; for from out the wreck of its stormy past, when the day of trial is over, Mexico, that land of legend and romance, more various than Greece, more mysterious than Egypt, shall arise to an era greater and more brilliant than any that is sung of in her myth or chronicled in the dazzling story of her conquest. Till that day dawns, it must be hers—
"to hope till hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates."
- Viva Mexico! Viva el Pueblo Mexicano!