ican people into fancying that the interests of its makers are their own, in order that they may be willing to go to war for them. It comes down to a question of the wisdom of the policy of "protecting American property" abroad with the army and navy of the public.
It is universally assumed, in the propaganda for the aggressive foreign policy to which Big Business is seeking to commit the nation, that the protection of the foreign enterprises of any American citizen is to the interest of all American citizens. It is assumed that foreign investments are in some way national institutions, monuments to the patriotism of their founders, as sacred as the very Stars and Stripes themselves. The assumption is the legitimate offspring of another assumption—that what is best for the nation's multi-millionaires is best for the nation.
Yet it would be difficult to show how the ownership of Mexican oil by Mr. Doheny benefits the ordinary American. The burden of proof is on the Dohenys, and they have not proved the point; they have only affirmed.
Quite to the contrary, it is much better that Mexican oil should be recognized as the property of Mexicans, if ownership by Americans would be likely to involve us in war or lead us into paths of aggression. So long as American industry is in neeed of capital, so long as American railroads are crying for a billion dollars a year more capital with which to make necessary improvements, so long as our western states plead for capital to come and develop their natural resources, no American dollar that runs into foreign countries, looking for cheaper labor and bigger profits, demanding "preparedness" to protect it, agitating for war to make its profits good, can claim to be a patriotic dollar. On the contrary, every adventuring Wall Street dollar that calls back to its army and navy to protect it is a traitor dollar.
In going to war to "protect American property" in Mexico we would spend far more of the people's money than the aggregate value of all the holdings that the war Was intended to protect.
Would it not be better, then, for the nation to buy out our patriotic citizens having investments in Mexico—to pay every American dollar back, not merely every dollar that has actually been invested, but every dollar that any American might claim to have invested, rather than to spend an equal sum and send
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