I do not purpose here to go into the events of those last days of Diaz’s rule. That story has already been told, many times and from various angles. I am merely interested in the European aspects of the matter, and particularly in the attitude of Germany. Europe was interested, as I have said. Diaz was growing old and could certainly not last much longer. Then change must come. Was the Golden Age of the foreign investor, which had so long continued in Mexico, to continue still longer? Or would it end with the death of the Dictator? To these questions, which were having their due share of attention in the chancellories as well as in the commercial houses of Europe, came another, less apparent but more troublesome and more insistent than any of these. Japan, it was rumored, although very faintly, was seeking to add to its considerable interest in Mexico, by securing a strip of territory on the western coast of that country—an attempt which, if successful, would almost certainly bring about intervention by the United States. My government was especially interested in this movement on the part of Japan. It knew considerably more about the plan than any save the principals, for, as I happened to learn later on, it had carefully encouraged the whole idea—for its own purposes. And it knew that at that very time, the financial minister of Mexico, Jose Yves Limantour, was conducting preliminary negotiations in Paris with representatives of Japan, regarding the terms of a possible treaty. It knew that even then a protocol of this treaty was being drawn up. There was only one thing that my government wanted—a copy of the protocol. It was that which I had been instructed to get! The personality of Limantour is one of the most interesting of our day. Brilliant, incorruptible, unquestionably the most able Mexican of his generation, he had for seventeen years been closely associated with the dictator, and for a considerable portion of that period had been second only to Diaz in actual power. His presence in Paris at this time was significant. He had left Mexico on the 11th of July, 1910, ostensibly because of the poor health of his wife, although it had been reported that a serious break had taken place between himself and Diaz. He had spent a certain amount of time in Switzerland, and had later come to Paris to arrange a loan of more that $100,000,000 with a group of English, French and German bankers. But that task had been completed in the early part of December, and in view of the unsettled conditions in Mexico, there was no good reason for his continuing in Paris, save one—the negotiations with Japan.