The Mexican Problem (1917)/Foreword and Preface
FOREWORD
This old globe is now belted with battle, in the greatest war that ever was or ever can be, to settle the problem of the brotherhood of man and of nations.
When the smoke shall have cleared away, there will be a new day for the whole world, and a new meaning to Christian brotherhood, as there will be a brotherhood of nations for the first time in human history.
In the future, national disorder must not be allowed anywhere in the world, for it leads to international disorder.
The idea that Mexico is a land to be exploited by foreign princes passed away with Maximilian.
The idea that it is to be exploited for the benefit of the United States must soon go by the boards, if it has not already gone.
What is wanted is a clear path to extend help to Mexico — Mexico in its normal disorder, moral, social, financial, and political.
As a student of the war and human progress, I went to Mexico to study the oil situation. I came back with something more important— "The Mexican Problem." Seeking its solution, where I had failed to find it in railroad, agricultural, or mining development, I found it in oil, because oil at the seacoast could give development from high wages without making sudden upset of the economic structure of the country. The United States had the first Mexican problem when it acquired from Mexico the Pacific Coast. It found the solution in gold; "gold at foot of tree," in the river-beds and banks and valleys. Gold paid high wages to him who could wash it out. It returned high wages for supplies. It invited roads across the continent, knitting this old Mexican territory into civilization and the Union.
The solution was Business with a big B. Agriculture followed. Agriculture is not business. Agriculture is just existence. Business is expanding wages all around, wages to labor, wages to capital; incentive to labor to accumulation, to luxury — luxury of freedom in body and mind — freedom to move the body from place to place and exercise the mind by human touch and contact!
Economic production is production in quantity. Exchange of surplus follows. This is commerce. But the fruit of commerce must not be wholly sordid accumulation. There must be fruitage and interchanged ideas and customs. There must follow mental development.
Man if alone on the ground is below the brute. He is slave to the soil, which will yield him food only by the sweat of his brow. Then he must store it and cook it and clothe and shelter himself. Nature clothes and shelters all other animals and satisfies their taste with raw food. Why so cruel to man? Only to be kind.
Man must work. God works; angels work; devils work. There is no redemption for man, there is no progress for man or woman, except by labor — labor of heart, mind and hand. Labor of the hand must be first; it purifies the blood coursing through brain and heart. Labor of the mind must follow that the hand may be directed; and labor of the heart must come in that hand and mind, by commerce and thought, may rightly touch its fellow. Only thus mutually can there be health, help, and progress.
No other animal has luxury, better food, or better shelter, whether there are thousands or millions more. But man may have progress by every other man. The more thousands the better each may be, and the more millions in humanity the greater and the more important the individual man. Negative this proposition and the universe of man, of humanity, is ended.
All other animals in pairs, families, or groups may be independent; men and likewise nations never can be. The chick chips its shell and instantly picks its food. Man must be led and taught. Animals have instinct. Men are denied it that they may know their fellow men.
Independence, individually and nationally, is passing away. The inventions, the mechanism, the arts, for man's progress are all here. The way is now open. Human slavery, serfdom, peonage, are passing. Democracy is rising. The last great struggle is on and fourteen nations and forty problems are in it. But it is all one, human freedom that man may know his fellow and that mutual helpfulness may arise, individually, collectively, nationally.
Independence Day must take on a new meaning. National independence is hereafter possible only by national interdependence.
America was opened in the desire for mental freedom. Here was born political freedom, destined to encircle the world in little more than a hundred years. Here, too, were struck down the shackles from human hands laboring in slavery. From freedom of hand and mind America must go forward, is going forward, in freedom, with heart pulsating for universal political freedom.
Human liberty can be maintained on this planet only by coordination of hand, of mind, of heart.
The heart of America is now expanding, east, west, and north; Japan and Australia, west; Canada and the British Isles to the north; France, Italy, Russia, our Allies, east! Can we forget Mexico, our nearest brother south? And she has so much to give us; fruit of the tropics, mineral and oil, wealth of a continent compressed into an isthmus, capacity for the happy, healthful, helpful labor of, not fifteen million, but fifty million people! And we so much to give her, the fruit of our political, social, mental, and machinery progress; our arts, chemistry, and financial and commercial systems! Of natural wealth she has abundance. Of helping hands, kindly direction, and organization she has woeful need. And who is neighbor to him that hath need?
After studying on both sides of the Atlantic the foundation causes for the war beginning in 1914, I presented the economic truth in The Audacious War: tariff causes, desire for territory and spheres of influence, dominion of overland and water routes that trade might expand; lack of national morality, and "The Will to Power." I thought I knew and understood it all.
Late in 1916 I dropped in upon Dr. Talcott Williams, as he spoke at the civic forum in Brookline, Massachusetts. I wanted to get his measure and divine what line of talent he might be turning out at Columbia for financial journalism. To my astonishment I got a new angle from which to view my own ignorance as to the causes of modern wars. I had thought that, while economic conditions were basal under Germany's most audacious war and Russia's long continued preparation for defense, certainly race and religion were at the root of troubles in the Balkans, in Turkey, and the Far East. But here again was the ever-lasting "bread-and-butter problem" or bread, even without butter, problem.
Dr. Williams showed from first-hand knowledge, and fifty years' reflection thereon, that our boasted Christian civilization, whatever it might be in its endings, was in its beginnings the disrupter of states and nations; that where villages and communities in the Balkans, in Turkey, in Africa, and in the Far East had existed in comparative peace for centuries and had their parchment records and title deeds older than any in modern Europe, their whole economic bread-and-butter fabric had been upset by goods "made in Germany"; cheaper manufactures from Vienna; the Armenian had let in the Christian banker and out went the home-current wares to foreign markets, while back came the foreign goods destroying local hand industries, with no economic substitution giving local employment. The Mohammedan traced the trade connection and started to kill the Armenians, whose Christian friends had taken away their livelihood. Vienna and Berlin goods also upset the business base in the Balkans. The people could not pay the Turkish tax exactions. On came the lash; and Germany found profit in selling the guns that responded. The outside world opened Manchuria, and where peace had reigned for hundreds of years nobody had since been able to maintain law or order. The Boxer Rebellion was a similar economic protest.
There was only one possible remedy. The old order could not be put back. The nations must unite and go forward. They must insure development by organization, capital, and modern machinery, which could exist only with courts of justice enforcing laws, order, and contracts. No other route was visible for either national or international peace.
When the demand became emphatic that my articles on Mexico, its oil fields, and its social, political, and economic problems take book form, I naturally turned to Dr. Williams to ask if he would set this forth in a preface with the conclusions he had reached for the problem Mexico presents to-day before the world.
C. W. BARRON
Boston, July 4 1917
PREFACE
These articles on the "Mexican Problem," by Mr. C. W. Barron, are to my mind a clear and wise economic picture of Mexico, beyond any others that I have read — and there is very little of the recent literature of Mexico which I have not read or examined.
Not one so grasps the clear, strong fact that Mexico is a hell on earth because Mexico has no law, save here and there for the brief season that some man keeps law and order to feed his own ambition to be an irresponsible ruler and possess present power and the possibility of future wealth.
It is forty years, to a few weeks, since, as the correspondent of the New York Sun at Washington, I walked one night into the house of the Mexican Minister at Washington, and told him — he had n't had the final news— that all was over with Lerda, the new successor of Juarez, who had sent him to Washington, and that Diaz was in control. I saw once more the most bitter sorrow, the most bitter pang of hopeless grief a man's face can mirror despair for the future of 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, lifted by the forces of invention, steam power, and individual initiative, so all the world was to rise in like manner and measure. When in our long rides over the mountains which rim Mesopotamia north and east, whose valleys feed its boundary rivers, boy-like, I brought him a split pebble of malachite, the rhomb of carbonate of iron, the shining black cubes of galena, the short staple of a cotton boll borne breast high as we camped by a rushing stream, and he worked out its possible water power, or I took lessons at a village loom he was prophesying the economic expansion to come. I do no despite to his flaming zeal for souls when I record that I never saw his face beam as when he taught one of his converts how to make sulphuric acid with the unmined sulphur deposit of Mosul, and the man improved on the process in Ure's Dictionary, that compend of fifty years ago.
The copper and the lead, he pointed out to me, the oil which rainbowed some streams on what is now the edge of the Kerkuk oil fields, are still undeveloped. This convert's tiny plant was stopped because it might lead to the easier making of explosives. But the good man's two sons are thriving business men not in Mosul opposite Nineveh, but in Providence, Rhode Island. My father's economic vision has never taken solid shape. Like visions, the world over, have been blasted. Why? Because economic development necessarily rests on courts that enforce contracts and on order that makes savings safe and provides better currency than cartridges, Mexico's popular legal tender today. Credits are only possible when contracts are enforced. Men will work with industry only where wages and property are protected. See how Mr. Barren describes the fashion in which the brief and uncertain economic protection of an American plant has turned the peon into a steady oil-producer, self-directed, in a great and complex plant.
If there are no courts that men can trust, there can be no credits or contracts. If these are not, neither capital nor wages come. Once, in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, even for a third of the nineteenth century, before steam on sea and land swept space aside, it was possible in isolation for some industrial community to gather strength, as in islanded England or in early organized France, and this development gave strength and power to the English King's Bench writ and to the French King's "Parlement."
Apart, China had, a century ago, a sound industrial system, narrow but stable, with a population overcrowded on the coast, but possessing in the interior peace and comfort, as Abbé Hue has testified. Alone, this development might have gone on. When steam brought English and American competition, China would have reorganized its industrial system if it had had courts and a judicial system possessing integrity and an efficient government to enforce judicial decrees; but competition destroyed its industries, and the absence of the foundation of all economic systems, justice, prevented China from advancing. First, in the south of China, earliest affected by European competition, came the Tai Ping Rebellion, and the new European arms of precision gave the central tyranny of the Manchu a new power. Later, North China broke out in the Boxer revolt, economic in origin. For fifteen years past, the interior has been aflame, rising first where the great rivers bring closer European trade. China is to-day a derelict, a hulk adrift on the ocean of history, where it has weathered so many storms, its industries, two centuries ago giving lessons to Europe, to-day deteriorated or destroyed.
This is the history of all Asia and of all North Africa, of much of Latin America. So long as the Turkish Sultan and the Moslem commonalty had the same arms, despotism could not go more than so far. When the Turkish army, a century ago, was new-armed and organized on the European model, naught could stay the despotism of Constantinople. The rugs of Anatolia and the wares of Kutaiyeh, ninety years ago the best faience of the West, have fallen from old standards. So with the solid colors of Peking wares, and the porcelains of the interior. Persia in the last fifty years has seen the art of four centuries cease as all its great caravan roads fell into disorder and the caravans carried European goods to the undoing of native industries unable to develop for lack of courts.
This has been a world movement. The inexorable principle that you cannot build a sound economic structure unless credit and contracts are sustained by courts that can be trusted, works as pitilessly as the attraction of gravitation on the bowing wall and the tottering fence, the arch of untempered mortar and the door jambs whose sill is heaved by frost. Sixty years ago I saw the process beginning in Turkey, first on the coast, later in the interior. Thirty years ago I saw the same forces at work in Morocco, in the mediaeval capital of Fez, whose old Andalusian potters and patterns were being ruined by German crockery.
Latin America has faced the same drastic pressure. A century ago all the world, when Canning called a new world into being to redress the balance of the old, looked to see the economic development of the revolted colonies of Spain and Portugal. Bad as Spanish administration was and relentless as was the censorship of the Inquisition, the printing-presses of Mexico turned out, relative to the mechanic art of the day, better work two hundred years ago than to-day. It is the older pottery of Mexico to which one turns for the far-flung influence of the faïence of Spain fashioned out of the light volcanic clays of Mexico. It is not the recent edifices of Mexico our architects study to give us what we call "Mission" architecture. Let Courts be absent and justice dubious, and the sure end of the investment of $1,000,000,000 which Mr. Barron sketches was predetermined. When "Boston people had great hopes of traffic in the Mexican Central line they built from El Paso to connect with the City of Mexico," they were themselves so familiar with the courts of Massachusetts that they looked on the justice men trust as a normal natural product of society. They forgot that rails must rest on more than rock ballast to be safe for profits.
Cuba, under the Platt Amendment, is secure and produces, year after year, a sugar crop nearly treble the best of the Spanish past, with rising wages because we insisted on order, courts that enforced contracts, and a sanitation which excluded pestilence. Economic prosperity, railroads that pay dividends, factories whose products meet competition, and a growing population can only come where courts are justly trusted and enforce contracts; when public health and a low death-rate maintain the vigor of the laborer, and his life, his property, and the schooling of his children are protected by a sound and efficient administration. Let these be absent and rule will become a gamble for power and money, men will buy concessions first and protection for them later, perennial disease will sap industry, and you can neither secure capital from abroad nor provide labor at home.
Japan, islanded and long able to shut out foreign competition, first by a policy of general exclusion and later by adroit internal administration, was able to reorganize its industries before they were sapped and destroyed. Its ruling class created a new judicial system which commanded such respect that exterritoriality and its courts were abolished at the opening of this century and native and foreigner trusted to the same justice. In other Asiatic lands special consular courts give the foreign merchant a standing advantage which destroys native credit and paralyzes native enterprise. Japan is a signal proof of the way an Asiatic land, if it be for a season protected, can reorganize its industry and create stable conditions out of which a new system can come, safeguarded and fostered by public order, courts creating confidence, and efficient sanitation.
It is no answer to say that the Japanese have special powers and a personal aptitude. Ask any man who knows the Far East as to the personal credit of Chinese and Japanese. Compare Persian and Japanese art when both were at work under similar conditions in the seventeenth century. I have known, boy and man, closely and intimately, a wide range of human beings. I have had at my table and been honored by the close personal friendship of men black, yellow, red, white, and many shades between. The Near East I know as do only those who speak its tongues, have known it in childhood, and mature years, read its literature, thrill to the genius of its various arts, and have the open heart and mind for its faiths. At bottom, men are alike. Human beings make Humanity. Under like conditions, all act alike. Give any land and any race a fair chance and it will be as others and not otherwise.
But after old systems, industrial and economic, are undermined and overthrown, this chance can only come by building anew under protected conditions. See how English courts are bringing India closer and closer to self-government. Where would Cuba be but for our aid? Give Mexico protection for order, courts, contracts, industries, and sanitation for a brief space, — one, two, or three decades, and what is this span in the life of a nation? — and the splendid qualities of the Mexican people would do the rest. Keep order, create courts, educate a generation, turn out typhus and tropical diseases which scourge the Mexican home (some of the worst maladies are not tropical), and the courage, the loyalty, the patient industry, the quick teachableness of the Mexican can be trusted to maintain what it secures under tutelage, and to add to it.
Mexico is to-day like the great oil wells of which Mr. Barron gives so vivid a picture, a fathomless resource for the light and power of the world, and needing only the mechanism which will enable it to set a thousand keels and ten thousand wheels in motion and light millions of happy homes.
How can the necessary order, effective courts, and national sanitation be provided for such great ends of justice?
The United States brought these things to Cuba and see the result, peace and prosperity without annexation and with complete autonomous independence for the Cuban people. Give the Mexican people the same chance, the same opportunity, a like period in which new institutions, new courts, new security, new sanitation come into being, and Mexico will show the same marvel of abounding progress.
The United States just a half-century ago saved Mexico from the foreign invader. To-day Mexico must be saved from the internal destroyer. One task was accomplished without invasion. The other may be. Accomplished it must be. Moral responsibilities know no boundary lines.
Talcott Williams
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
New York July 1, 1917