This, I think, is the point of departure in our misunderstanding of the Mexican situation, especially as it applies to oil. Mexican jealousy and Mexican realization of the weakness of the national psychology in great enterprise have set Mexico frantic with the success, the triumph, the apparent imperturbability of the great foreign oil companies. This alone has made their hostility to the American drillers, linemen and engineers who night and day, month after month through the years of the war, kept the lines open, the oil flowing. Unarmed, and slaughtered by the score from ambush, grim, unkempt, often happily drunk in town, these frontiersmen added their bit to the fire, to be sure. But note this--it was not the white man’s rough assertion of superiority or the companies’ “tactless insistence,” but the Mexican’s conception of his own inferiority, personal, commercial, political, which lit the flame and kept it burning. The world has entered upon a new industrial era, the age of petroleum. The commercial struggle is to-day not the war for markets, but the race for oil lands. And of all the petroleum fields known to exist, those in Mexico are the greatest in actual production, the greatest in potential extent, and the most favorably situated for distribution--all vivified by the greatest individual oil wells in the records of the world. The story of the development of that oil field is linked with the history of Mexico, inexorably, inevitably a part of it, influencing it, all but dominating it.