Yet strangely enough, if you will, it is to my mind largely because of this same energy, the achievement which this spirit indicates and predicates, that the difficulties of the foreign oil companies in Mexico have been the sort they are. Their persecution has sprung from the realization of the Mexicans that these Americans, these English, these Dutch, are doing in Mexico and for Mexico what Mexicans can not, dare not, do. The Mexicans from generals to peons, are frantic, baffled, rabid, at the wretched Gringoes who dare to pour their millions out to drill wells, to build pipe lines and terminals and ships, to take and to convert this black and liquid gold from the soil of Mexico. Of the hundreds of wells drilled in the Tampico-Tuxpam fields, some of them the veriest “wildcats” on the flimsiest of chances, hundreds of them as sure as opening a bank vault, only a half dozen, and none a “wildcat,” have been drilled by Mexicans as individuals or in corporations, and not a single ship, not a single storage tank, not a mile of pipe line, is Mexican. Were the Mexican government to take over the administration of the oil fields to-day, drilling would cease utterly, to-morrow development would stop and when, a year hence, it became vital to open more wells, the event would be marked by government ceremonies and stifling graft. Every one who knows Mexico knows that this is the truth. The Mexicans themselves know it, and from the Tampico policeman who howls in outraged anger when an American motorist refuses to be disturbed by official anathemas, up to the presidential secretaries who devise complicated and childish schemes to force the oil companies into recognizing the dignity of Mexican sovereignty, the whole attitude toward the oil business has been fraught with effort to maintain that hazy halo of the weakling, delicate “sensitiveness,” national pride, _amour propre_. When I left New York to study Mexican problems for the present writing, I was convinced that the full facts of the case, on both sides, were to be found in the United States; Washington was indeed the battle ground of lawyers and diplomats. Not until I reached Tampico, however, not until I went out to the oil fields, did I realize that the real problem is not the question of diplomatic controversy or commercial adjustment. There, on the long roads, where but one _peon_ of all the thousands whom we passed, took off his hat to the white _patrones_, as every one would have done twelve years ago, I found the touchstone. I knew then why reason will not prevail, why justice is non-existent, why no white man has yet been able to feel firm ground beneath his feet in the discussion of the oil problems. These problems have had their rights and wrongs, as we shall see, but I think that the great difficulty we at home have had in believing that our own people could be right has been our inability to conceive how, being right, the Mexicans could be so hostile to them.