As to the first statement, I have answered it in the chapter, "Four Mexican Strikes." Three of these strikes are famous and there is no excuse for Mr. Stevens' having heard of none of them. As to the second statement, there are some hundreds of Americans who are just now fervently wishing it were really true—fervently wishing that they could get a settlement on the basis of twenty-five cents on the dollar. In February, 1910, about the time Mr. Stevens was penning so glowingly, the United States Bank of Mexico, the largest bank in the country which catered to Americans, was wrecked in exactly the same way as most American bank wrecks are made—by misappropriation of funds to support a speculative scheme. The bank went to smash, the president went to jail, the depositors did not get their money and at this writing there seems little chance of their getting any of it. Certainly they will never get all or half of it. And this was not the only disaster of the sort that has lately occurred in Mexico. About May 1, 1910, another American bank, the Federal Banking Company, went to smash and its cashier, Robert E. Crump, went to jail. The fact is that there was no ground for Mr. Stevens' statement whatsoever.
To quote all of Mr. Stevens' blunders would be to quote most of his three articles. He went to Mexico to prepare a defense of Diaz and he did not take the trouble to put a liberal sprinkling of facts in his defense. He was taken in charge by agents of Diaz and he wrote down what they told him to write. He was even taken in on the little yarn about the Yucatan slave who got his master into jail, a yarn which had done duty before. The story runs that a henequen king beat one of his laborers, the laborer appealed to a justice of the peace, who arrested and fined the master. The truth
