Revolutionary radicalism has run its course in Mexico, and we are back again at a rule of capitalism, a rule which capitalism, for right or wrong, cannot longer avoid. The eyes of the world are on the moneyed powers of the world. It is childish to try to deceive radicals or conservatives with saying anything else. To-day, in Yucatan, capitalism (because circumstances have forced it to do so) is exacting the toll of penalty from the henequen industry and its native spokesmen. To-day in Tampico, capitalism hesitates to move on, and waits for the ruin which will tumble about it, forcing it, in its turn, to grind Mexico beneath its heel. Somehow, dimly, seems to emerge the lesson which Mexico has for us and for the world. Capitalism must in the end save the world from the ruin of revolution. To-day in Mexico it can move quickly and freely. To-morrow it may be clutched in the very destruction which is upon it, and be forced, itself, to the destruction not alone of the enemies of our civilization, but of the fabric of progress of that civilization. The story of Yucatan is written. Is the story of Tampico and all Mexico to follow the same plot, and is the world to go blindly on, believing that in compromise it shall gain strength? Truly the crimson feast is preparing for the vultures, and vultures will our eagles of business become if they wait longer on their distant heights for revolution to finish its bloody orgy. To-day there is yet time. In Mexico there is yet time. Why wait for the chaos, from which there seems but one emergence, the emergence to intervention and blood and long foreign rule? The one stable force, the wealth of Mexico, must choose a nobler course than that waiting, than that cynical hoping. It can choose and it must choose. Old worlds are indeed passed away and the paths of new stars are to-day being plotted. In the courses of those new stars power will be used without apology, as the revolutionary radicalism which our old civilization created moves without apology. Our duty is to the future, not to the dead past of compromise and convention and self-righteousness. Is capitalism honest and sincere and bound up with the welfare of the human race? Or is it indeed the vulture which waits to feast only upon dead bodies amid ruins? To-day in Mexico it waits vulture-like. Its sincerity and its true righteousness are to be determined not by slavish waiting for the ruin which will force it to use its power, as it is using it in Yucatan, but by its moving, to-day, to the solving of the great problems of a great nation as it alone can solve them. Capitalism and not revolution, the corporations and people of Mexico, and not foreign pressure, must in the end give answer before the last Tribunal. Transcriber’s Notes Page 18: “southermost point” changed to “southernmost point” Page 114: “outrage perpetated” changed to “outrage perpetuated” Page 142: “or for propety” changed to “or for property”