Carranza encouraged and abetted a military oligarchy which supported brigandage as a means for its own profit. Campaigns against the bandits and rebels were not pressed, arms and ammunition were sold by the federals to the bandits and rebels, in order that the military might continue to have work to do. The officers, acting as their own paymasters, padded the army rolls to many times their actual size, and the balance between the expenses and pay of the actual army and the phantom army was pocketed by the officers. The Obregon process, a variation of the Carranza plan, paid millions of pesos in cash and land to ex-bandits and revolutionaries, setting up Villa on a rich hacienda, and paying out the resources of the nation to buy the appearance of a peace. Revolutionary favorites, as we have seen, were given the rich state of Yucatan for loot. They foisted upon that community (the only spot in Mexico where any wealth has ever been created through manufacturing and industry as opposed to the sacking of the riches of the soil), a so-called “socialistic” régime. A “modern state” was set up, and the experiment of taking from the rich for the benefit of the poor was set in full swing. By means of a great national monopoly of the hemp industry, prices were so inflated that in the course of five years the American farmer paid, in artificially-increased prices for twine for his wheat-binding machinery, $112,000,000 to the Mexican revolution. The state-controlled hemp trust has been forced to relinquish its control, and the costly experiment seems passed. Here is the first collapse of the Mexican fetish of socialistic demagogy, but it seems safe to believe that it will not be the last. So stands the record, incomplete, shorn of detail, but each item taken from the history of shame which has been written in Mexico in the years just passed. Hidden behind a curtain of fair words and lofty idealism, the shame has been committed, but behind that same curtain to-day disintegration is hurrying on, coming as it came to Yucatan in the grist of inevitable retribution. That we may understand the end, it behooves us not to close our eyes to the beginnings.