To-day the world’s need of oil threatens the life of Mexico. It is eating out her body by revolutions, by bandit governments, by colossal graft which feeds on the ever growing river of gold from the oil fields. The world’s need for Mexico’s oil threatens her with intervention, not because of capitalistic machinations, but because of the crass and wicked injustices which the wealth has tempted her to wreak upon her foreign residents, because wealth has undermined her government and given her over to demagogues. CHAPTER IX THE GOLDEN GEESE In all these devious ways Mexico has tried to kill the goose which lays her golden eggs. Not the least onerous of her efforts in this direction has been the seeking she has always done to make the United States government and American business men take the responsibility for this precious goose of commerce. And sad to tell--to the Mexican mind at least--we have not always awakened quite promptly enough to our sudden new responsibilities, and the goose has more than once dropped near to dying in our arms. That golden goose was the product of the nature of Mexico and of the régime of Porfirio Diaz. Long before Mexico became independent, long before the social problems which assail her now had been allowed to gain impetus, Nature had given up vast riches from the Mexican soil. Spain garnered them in, and gave Mexico such care as she knew how to give, and the golden era of the three centuries of Colonial life rolled out. Then came the first revolution, and the destruction of such wealth as Spain had left, until Diaz organized what remained and with it began his thirty years of peace. In those thirty years. Mexico was changed from a land whose wealth poured out in bonanzas returning only caprice for industry and wealth for caprice, into one where industry, solidly invested capital, and wise foresight gained the golden fruit. In other words, the goose became domesticated, and produced golden eggs when she was appropriately fed with golden capital and golden brains. It was literally the wealth imported and created by those years of peace and domestication which made possible the outbreak of revolutionary activity in 1910 and drove Diaz from Mexico in 1911. Prosperity was too much for poor Mexico.