Mexico was of course our chief field for activity, and there our Black List had its severest test. In those months of struggle, we committed many faults; we shut off friendly firms from trade with this country; we encouraged, by many stupidities, the activities of smugglers and “cloaks” who bought for the Germans in Texas jobbing towns; we created for ourselves a phalanx of enemies of American trade who will not soon forget. Worse than this, even, when the war was over the tremendous machinery of the enforcement of the provisions of the Enemy Trading Act, with its literally priceless information regarding the business of Mexico, the capital and trade of the Germans, the Mexicans, and the Americans in the whole country--all this was thrown away. Literally it was cast into the waste-basket, and the information which if followed up and kept even partially up to date would to-day be the richest mine of information for American importers and exporters was scrapped like worn-out machinery. I do not know how many millions of dollars were spent in gathering this data for the War Trade Board, but I do know the nature of that data. It is gone, and the advantage which might have come from it is lost forever. But the unfriendliness which was engendered by our mistakes, which was only slowly being wiped out by the correction of those mistakes when peace came--that unfriendliness remains. That is our only heritage of our Mexican activity in the war; it couples up with our own mistakes of ignorance or of carelessness during the same period. From 1915 to 1919, literally all the foreign trade of Mexico passed through the United States. Imports and exports, the goods from and for England and Japan and China and Africa no less than our own domestic trade with Mexico went through the border ports by rail. Of necessity, the advantages of ship traffic were lost, and our manufacturers and our buyers of Mexico’s raw materials had the greatest opportunity of all time to capture the vast bulk of the Mexican trade. The tremendous apparent increases in our Mexican trade during the war years were only the record of the world’s commerce passing through our border towns. But to-day we have retained only a little of the gains recorded then, and we shall lose still more of what we have kept. And why? Because we have never truly sought Mexican trade and do not seek it to-day.