For the oil industry of Mexico is overwhelmingly a foreign enterprise. American and British and Dutch are the flags which should fly from the oil derricks, for neither Mexico nor Mexicans have had a hand worth the naming in the opening of the nation’s richest treasure-house. The search for oil in Mexico has taken on the nature of a race, a battle, between British and American oil interests, a battle not without its tremendous significance in the world oil situation. But behind this struggle, which is still and, we may hope, will remain a friendly one, loom controversies which are vaster than Mexico or England or America, problems on whose solution the very future of our civilization depends. For the real battle in Mexico is not between the two great Anglo-Saxon powers, but between the powers of light and the powers of darkness. In Mexico’s oil fields to-day is being settled the question of whether enterprise shall have the right to bring the riches of the earth to the aid of humanity, of whether industrial power belongs to the backward people who by accident find that power in their inept hands, or to those who can develop and raise it up to the service of mankind. Upon the issue in Mexico depends not only the usefulness of all the petroleum resources of that country, but the future development of oil in Colombia, Venezuela, all South America, all Asia, all Africa. And the future of oil development in those lands is the future of the world’s oil supply, for there, alone, remain stores sufficient to meet the multiplying needs of the world. The solution of this question is vastly complicated. Within the oil situation itself are many problems such as those just noted. Bearing upon it is the tangle of cross-purposes, indirections and varying psychologies. That solution is made all but impossible by the conditions of Mexico to-day, by the flabby weakness of the rulers of the Mexican people, by their blindness and selfishness. It has been jammed, time and again, by the failure of the oil companies and their representatives to assert their rights with a skill equal to that of the Mexicans in casting up mountains of controversy out of mole hills of technicality. But the story of Mexican oil is not all ugly calling of names, not all mere hopeless tangle. The history of its discovery and development is rich with color. The romance of an oil field, like the romance of a gold camp, is always a thrilling tale. But the story of Tampico has this other element, for it is indeed the great romance of our race, the tale of the white man round the world, the building of gigantic enterprises, the harnessing of unknown forces, neglected for centuries by apathetic natives, unlocked by the vision and the enterprise of the Anglo-Saxon.