Again, although the President repeatedly pronounced against intervention on behalf of property interests in general, and American property interests in particular, he also repeatedly threatened Mexico on behalf of property interests. In a communication devoted to the question of oil taxes, and to the application of Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution, and in which the killing of Americans was not mentioned, President Wilson notified President Carranza:
As it is beyond any probability that the killing of Americans in Mexico could suddenly be ended; and as negotiations covering a period of six years, involving every form of pressure and coercion, have not yet brought President Carranza to the Wilson view as to the protection due American property; and as President Carranza has given every evidence of a determination to oppose any more far-reaching violations of Mexican sovereignty than have yet been restored to, the publication of the notes of April, 1918, and of July, 1919, will have to be accepted as notification to America and to the world that the President is seriously contemplating war with Mexico.
The only alternative to this view is that these notes are a bluff. But there are many reasons for believing that they are not a bluff.
To go back, first, to an earlier period, we once sent a "punitive expedition" to Mexico. It was recalled only after the President must have been quite certain that we were about to go to war with Germany. Although the President had declared that the expedition was "for the sole purpose of taking the bandit, Villa," it remained in Mexico nine months after the chase of Villa had been definitely abandoned. Why?
The answer was frankly given by Franklin K. Lane, Wilson's Secretary of the Interior, and Chairman of the Mexican American Joint Commission, at the end of November, 1916, in a public statement explaining the American Government posi-
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