It seems unlikely that without the geographical and geological conditions which offered the wealth of minerals to the development of capital, Mexico would or could have entered upon the modern stage of her development. In that was the hope of the past and in it, too, is the hope of the future regeneration of Mexico. The tempting possibilities of such development are the only bait which will bring back to Mexico the stream of foreign capital to which alone she can look for her prompt salvation, when peace comes at last. The geography and climate have had their hand, too, in the industrial situation in Mexico. Mining, in the time of Diaz, drained the available labor away from the farms and away from the small factories which then existed. The oil fields have more recently taken a large proportion of the available workers. The supply of labor in Mexico is astonishingly small--the development of the latent labor supplies in the Indian communes waits on peace and education. Temperamentally (and in this we find the hand of climate) the Mexican is not a good factory worker. The raw products which the land produces, sisal hemp, cotton, rubber, etc., all demand for their profitable manufacture large and intricate plants, such as Mexico has not built and for whose operation she has never trained her people. Therefore, save for the cotton factories (which produce only the coarser staples) there is to-day in Mexico almost no industrial development. The lists of industries of which such a manufacturing town as Monterey boasts, include, for instance, candle and match factories employing thirty or forty people, brass bed “factories,” where the products of American foundries are put together, soda water factories--the industries which no city in any other land would find worth mentioning. Mexican industry, indeed, waits surely upon the development of the crops of raw materials, upon the education of her laboring classes, and upon the solution of the problems of irrigation and water power. Geography and climate have been cruel to Mexico,--of this we need not seek to deceive ourselves. But throughout the list of unhappy conditions which has been set down here there runs a promise of advancement and of better things--when peace comes and when foreign enterprise shall again be welcomed. All of the advance which Mexico has made in her long fight against an unkind Nature has been made with the help of foreign energy. First was Spain, and the 300 years in which she built up the colony to a semblance of a modern state, creating great cities and peace and prosperity. Then, after fifty years of destructive revolution, Diaz, and his wise invitation to and use of foreign enterprises and foreign money. Only in these two periods has Mexico been prosperous.