Strangely enough, the strong in Mexico are not altogether contented with this condition. Somehow business, with its awakening consciousness to its helplessness, is finding the situation irksome. The greatest single industry in Mexico to-day is oil, and oil pays about $50,000,000 a year in various taxes to the Mexican government--and for what? Almost all of it for the privilege of doing business, and the result is that oil is at the mercy, to-day, of government caprice and the caprice of Mexican officials. The laws of the present era of Mexico are enacted literally for the purpose of having a “club” of control over all forms of business activity, laws to be enforced when it is convenient, or to be “forgotten” when that is desirable. The oil companies spend time and vast effort to keep their protests to the Washington and Mexican governments in good order--so that the price of their privileges may be kept low. The legitimate portion of their taxes is only about forty per cent of the total sum they pay, but it is probably literally true that they would pay all they now pay and more if they could dispense with the rule of privilege and trade it for decent human rights to do decent business in a decently governed country. In this, these companies are fighting the fight of the individual business man as well as the fight of their own stockholders. It may all be selfish, and doubtless is, but by a strange turn of affairs, the laws of Mexico have worked out to the creation of salable privilege instead of defensible rights, and this has thrown all business into the same group. The business problem of Mexico is literally the achievement of this exchange of privileges for rights. And until that exchange is effected, he is but a gambler who goes into Mexico to seek or to offer honest business, for even though he should gain much sure profit in the beginning, those profits will be more than wiped out later unless the legitimate business of Mexico is given the legitimate rights of business. And how is this exchange of privileges for rights to be effected? This is the problem that confronts American business and American government to-day. The issue is joined clean and is simple indeed. The provisions of the Mexican Constitution of 1917 and the laws which give it effect remain on the Mexican statute books to-day because they are profitable to the group in control of the government. They mean, literally, graft and power, for where privilege is necessary for the carrying out of business, there is a price on privilege, but where rights are provided for business, the price and the prize are upon industry and activity.