years, and these are mendacity and lawless greed. It will be noted that the author of the article does not hesitate to allege that the grants and subsidies given by the Diaz government were successfully used as bribes to influence the State Department, the Senate, the press, and the whole people of the United States. This may be accepted as a fair measure of the truthfulness of the Carranza propaganda with which the country has been flooded. What the writer really meant, although he did not say it, was that the Mexicans had taken, and propose to continue to take by the strong hand, tie property acquired by citizens of the United States and other foreigners in their country.
It is my purpose to show that no citizen of tie United States, during the Diaz regime, ever acquired, by grant or subsidy, a dollar's worth of oil territory, gold, silver, or copper mines, or land; and that the railroad subsidies from which American citizens benefited were probably the most moderate ever given for such value as was received by Mexico in the building of her railroads, and were very much less than subsidies granted by our own country for a like purpose. Also, that in the use of the subsidies by the recipients of them a degree of honesty was exhibited which we cannot claim to have been exercised in handling subsidies granted for railroad construction in the United States. As an illustration of the reckless falsehoods which
