one's own land. In my life I have seen this look in the face of Hungarian, Italian, Pole, Cuban, through a long list of lands, down to a Mexican on the day I write these lines.
In the forty years since I saw Señor Mariscal grip the arms of his chair, his knuckles whitening and his dark face turning a paling gray, I have never in all the many pages I have written on Mexico, and many another troubled land, had a shadow of doubt that Mexico would be where Mexico is to-day, as these letters tell, with cartridges for currency, because my boyhood and the dawning fact, thought, and writing which led to journalism were passed in southern Turkey between the Tigris and Euphrates, where the grim problem, which has wrapped the world in universal war, was at its beginning of the manifold hopes which have left but ashes.
I was a missionary's son and my father, the Reverend W. F. Williams, sent forth by the A.B.C.F.M., had that unusual thing in a missionary, an engineer's training with the knowledge of the mineralogist. The wide world was full of the rosy belief that, as in the United States and in Europe west of the Vistula, the economic basis of life was visibly rising like a new continent of human cheer and happiness,
