Something that developed in a conversation with Mr. Lind has been making me a bit thoughtful, and more than a little uneasy. He has the idea, perhaps the plan, of facilitating the rebel advance by raising the embargo, and I am afraid he will be recommending it to Washington. We had been sitting, talking, after dinner, shivering in the big room over a diminutive electric stove, when he first tentatively suggested such action. I exclaimed: “Oh, Mr. Lind! You can’t mean that! It would be opening a Pandora box of troubles here.” Seeing how aghast I was, he changed the subject. But I cannot get it out of my head. The Mexican book is rolled out like a scroll before him; can it be that he is not going to read it? Any measures tending to undermine the central authority here, imperfect though it be, can only bring calamity. I witnessed that at first hand in the disastrous overturning of the Diaz rule and the installation of the ineffective Madero régime. I think Madero was more surprised than any one that, after having taken so much trouble to help him in, we took so little to _keep_ him in. The diplomats are forever insisting that Diaz’s situation in 1877 was analogous to Huerta’s now, and that after a decently permissible delay of ten months, or whatever it was, we recognized him. So why not Huerta? He, at least, is in possession of the very delicate machinery of Mexican government, and has shown some understanding of how to keep it going. _Later._ The lunch at the German Legation was most interesting. Lind, Rabago, the Belgian minister, and ourselves were the guests. Rabago doesn’t speak a word of English, and Mr. Lind not a word of Spanish, so there was a rather scattered conversation. Everybody smiled with exceeding amiability--all to show how safe we felt on the thin ice. The colleagues are always very polite, but none of them is really with us as regards our policy. Standing with von Hintze by the window for a few minutes after lunch, I used the word intervention, and von Hintze said something about the unpreparedness of the United States for war. This, though true, I could not accept unchallenged from a foreigner. I answered that if war were declared, we would have a million men at the recruiting offices between sunrise and sunset. It sounded patriotic and terrifying, but it was rendered rather ineffective by his reply, “Men, yes, but not soldiers. Soldiers are not made between sunrise and sunset.” He added something about the apparent divergence in public opinion in the States, and threw a bit of Milton at me in the shape of “not everybody thinks they serve who only stand and wait.” Ignoring this quotation from the blind bard, I said that whatever the divergence of public opinion might be _before_ war, the nation would be as one man with the President _after_ any declaration. I also told him we did not regard the Mexican situation so much as a military situation as a police and administrative job, which we were unwilling to undertake.