In Mexico we see that threat from Russia developed with the thoroughness of a too-eager pupil. In Yucatan the cycle has brought two vast financial interests to battle--the millions of the Equitable and the Royal Bank of Canada, against the International Harvester with other unlimited resources. In mightier and more daring terms, and even more deliberately, in Tampico and in the false issues of concessions, Mexico and the governments, radical, bolshevist indeed, of the revolutionary era, have been setting not merely groups of financiers but the interests of nations at each other’s throats. The issues of concessions on the one side and open oil fields on the other seem to have been planned and fomented and distributed with a deliberation which is not Mexican to bring the United States and England to grips--in Mexico. So the spoken threat of Lenin finds elaborate action in distant Mexico. Oil has been the victim, the tool, then, of those who would destroy our civilization? We do not know. But this we do know--that to save itself, to save great nations from war, to save the world’s oil for the uses of civilization, oil must come to its own rescue. It may be saved temporarily in other ways than by itself, but itself it must save sooner or later. If sooner, the power will be for good; if later, it will be for destruction, even as the powers in Yucatan are being expended for destruction. The comparison is inadequate, perhaps unfair, but the vision is crystal clear. It shows the last great power of the world--wealth--diverted from its proper channels to battle within itself. The dragon’s teeth of capitalism have raised up armies and the stone cast by bolshevism has thrown them at each other’s throats. And this cannot be, and must not be. Our civilization rocks. Were it to pass on to the millennium, the rocking would be worth the price. But we see, not the millennium, but, as in Yucatan, the coming of new destructions, with capital, and labor, in rôles of ignominy. For to-day oil, and the capitalism it represents, as yet does little good for Mexico. It pours its wealth--nearly $50,000,000 a year--into the coffers of government and there, like the golden apple, it creates discord and wars and bloodshed. It feeds and fattens the group in power and makes it worth the while for other groups as fast as their petty agitations will allow, to rise up and overthrow their predecessors, to the end of getting their share of the loot, and a new distribution of favors. The gold which pours into the national treasury inspires, as we have seen, all manner of radical legislation and constitutional provisions and oppressions to make the capitalism which develops the oil disgorge more and more of oil’s wealth, and bow more deeply beneath the yoke of political personalism.