The third element of the Mexican oil problem has to do with concessions. This is a phase of nationalization, but to-day it has taken on an importance which recently obscured other issues. The government had issued a number of what are called “federal zone concessions,” giving to individuals and companies the right to explore and extract oil from the rivers, lakes, etc. The federal zones are narrow strips along the seashore and navigable rivers on which an easement has been reserved for the public use. The American oil companies contend that this mere easement cannot be converted into absolute ownership, which is the effect when the government grants to third parties the right to drill wells there and thus to tap the pools of oil which the companies have discovered and developed and on which they are paying rentals to land owners. There were a few oil concessions under Diaz, practically all to English companies. One of the great shibboleths of the Madero revolution was the wiping out of the system of concessions, so no more were given until toward the end of the Carranza régime. Beginning then, becoming almost an orgy in the brief rule of de la Huerta, and continuing into the days of Obregon, concessions have become common, some going indirectly to a few American companies, many to the British corporations and more to Mexican favorites of the ruling group. The concessions issued cover practically every river and semi-arid gully (regarded as a “navigable stream” for the purposes of the concession) in the whole Tampico-Tuxpam field, a stretching of the “federal zone” idea in order to make possible the penetration of the producing fields by concessionaires. Other concessions are of different sort. Under de la Huerta one was issued giving the right to explore rivers, lakes and government lands over the entire republic, with preferential drilling rights up to a production of 400,000,000 barrels per year, the chief consideration being a return to the Mexican government of 40 per cent of the gross value of the oil found. Another, to a company, also American, gives rights to explore Lower California and other West Coast states, with the privilege of denouncing not only government lands, but private properties as well--the return to the government in this case is 10 per cent of the gross. The concession feature of the oil question, like the others which I have described, has its rights and its wrongs, but the fact of giving concessions, and in such blanket form, to take oil from the lands of private property holders, is in itself proof of but one thing--the intention of the Mexican government, not to conserve its resources of oil for the benefit of its people and the generations yet unborn, but to get out of the oil business as much as possible as quickly as possible--and solely for itself and its favorites.