To-day, with the shutting down of hundreds of the haciendas, and the return of the country to its primeval agriculture, the situation has become extremely serious, and the food importations have grown out of all proportion to the industrial growth of the country; in fact, almost in inverse ratio to the industrial depression of the country. This presents a serious problem, but it also presents a promise of new opportunity when peace comes to Mexico. For then there must come a revival of large-scale farming, the growth of a new farming system, and with it a tremendously increased market for modern farm implements. There has been much talk, on the part of the revolutionary governments, of the needs of the new small farmers for agricultural machinery, but this is almost entirely talk, for the new small farmers are only falling back to the way of their ancestors, and are not in any sense taking the place of the ruined haciendas in food production for the cities and industrial sections. That development will probably come in the form of an entirely new system of agriculture, in which foreign machinery and of necessity foreign capital must have a vital part. One of the inevitable developments of Mexican agriculture must be in the direction of irrigation. There is literally not enough good accessible land which will produce without irrigation to feed the country or, what is more important, to make an increase of population possible. This land must be created by irrigation, and irrigation, owing to the geographical formation of the country, must of necessity be carried out by great capital. Many of the village communes have irrigation systems, of a crude sort. Water is brought from distant streams, where it flows after the rainy season, and in some places it is brought up from the underground streams by means of crude water-wheels operated by man-power. But the total area watered by such irrigation is relatively insignificant, and as dams can be built in Mexico only at large cost, the true development of Mexican irrigation waits on peace, on foreign capital and government investment and encouragement. Something of this sort had been begun before the present era of revolutions. In the closing years of the Diaz régime (before 1911) many franchises were granted to large private companies which planned irrigation projects, and the sum of 90,000,000 pesos was ordered expended on government irrigation over a period of years. A few of the private companies had put their plans into execution, and many others, on the way to accomplishment, were nipped and destroyed by the subsequent revolutions. For the past ten years, nothing has been done toward solving the problems of irrigating the fertile but unwatered lands of Mexico, and it seems hardly likely that anything will be done under the threats of confiscation which now hang over all great enterprise there.