Page:Mexico under Carranza.djvu/129

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MEXICO UNDER CARRANZA
113

Government and no provision was made for carrying mails free. There was a provision for the transportation of United States troops and this stipulation, it is said, was inserted because it was recognized that probably United States troops would have to be moved over the lines for their protection against Indians. Even this small benefit to the Government was afterward reduced by a ruling that the stipulation regarding the transportation of troops meant only that there should be no charges for trackage, but did not oblige the company to furnish cars free. It is also worth while for those who appear to feel that Mexico should be rescued from the consequences of improvident railroad subsidies granted, to consider the manner in which the subsidies were dealt with by the interests building the Mexican and the American railroads respectively.

Nothing with which foreigners have been connected in Mexico has been more bitterly denounced by Carranza propagandists than the railroads built by American investors with the aid of subsidies. One of the bitterest and most mendacious of these denunciations appears in a somewhat portentous volume by DeLara and Pinchon published in New York under the title of "The Mexican People: Their Struggle for Freedom" a few months after the Carranza revolution began. In a chapter entitled "The Railways" are some statements