quietly by while the criminals were allowed to flee into Mexico, there to have refuge from just punishment. "When Mexico will pursue the marauders, the United States will be glad to stop doing so at its own boundary," but cases in which Mexican troops were fed with the cattle yielded by border raids, the commanding officer knowing of the theft, protecting the raiders, and furnishing them with arms, were unbearable. If Mexico could not, or would not, punish such acts, the United States, it was intimated, would have to, whatever happened to the theory of sovereignty in the meantime.[1]
While these events were taking place, the governments were in negotiation to try to secure some basis for an agreement by which the threatening clash could be avoided. Finally, in 1881, a limited reciprocal right of crossing was arranged, but one, unfortunately, that it proved impossible to make permanent. Though the agreement did not satisfy either side, it helped to bridge over what proved to be the period of greatest danger. Both sides continued to report atrocious happenings, but there developed a greater willingness to admit that the problem was a mutual one in which the elimination of the cause was at least as important as the maintenance of the theoretic rights of sovereignty.
General Polk, commanding the Department of the Missouri in the early '80s, declared it beyond question "that bands of thieves infest the whole southwest and plunder citizens in both countries." "They. . . are sometimes occupied in smuggling, at others in steal-
- ↑ Ibid., p. 612.
