statements. Mr. Lewis' article was prepared so literally at the last moment that, when it came, the magazine had already been paged and the article had to be put in as an insertion, with special paging. A laughable feature of the campaign was that, in introducing his knights of the defense, the editor of the Cosmopolitan moralized at length on the matter of permitting raw and untried writers—meaning myself—to handle important subjects, and named a list of proven and guaranteed to be reliable writers among whom was Mr. Alfred Henry Lewis. But when Mr. Lewis came to write! I pray that in all this book there is not one mistake one-half as ridiculous as any of a dozen in Mr. Lewis' short article.
Mr. Lewis modestly remarked, near the start, that: "Personally, I know as much of Mexico and Mexicans as any." But the burden of his story was that my writings were inspired by Standard Oil, which wanted revenge on Diaz for having been "kicked out of Mexico." Now how Mr. Lewis could have lived in the United States during the previous few months and read the newspapers without having learned of the oil war in Mexico, a war in which at the very time the lines were written, Standard Oil seemed on the point of forcing its only competitor to sell out to it on unfavorable terms, how Mr. Lewis could have failed to know that Standard Oil owns millions of dollars worth of oil lands and does a vast majority of the retail oil business in Diaz-land, how he could have been ignorant of the fact that H. Clay Pierce, head of the Standard Oil corporation in Mexico, is a director of the National Rail ways of Mexico, the government merged lines, so-called, and a close ally of President Diaz, is a little difficult to understand. Personally, Mr. Lewis knows as much of Mexico and Mexicans as any! Any—what?
