Up until ten years ago, there was an aristocracy in Mexico counting in its make-up many able men, groups of able men, devoted as far as their lights allowed them, to a paternalistic care of the Indians and peons, and to the development of Mexico as a great, modern state. Under Diaz there was also a slow building of a material civilization, looking, in the future, to the filling of the peon stomach and the lifting of the peon mind through education to the light of the white man’s world, to a place in the white man’s commerce. It has been the common usage, in this past decade since Diaz fell, to excoriate that aristocracy, to blame it for all the evils of the country, to point with bitter scorn at its wealth, at its material monuments of churches and palaces and mines and railways. And yet, although these ten years of revolutions have been devoted most effectively to the elimination of the Mexican upper classes and of their materialism and its monuments, the condition of the lower classes has not been alleviated by one tiny burden, nor has it been lifted by one hair’s breadth. The Mexicans of to-day are worse off than they were in the days of Diaz; they are worse off than in that wild revolutionary period before Diaz; I am not so sure that they are not in worse condition than they were under the Spaniards, for they seem literally to be sliding back to an era of barbarism like only to that misery which was theirs before the Spaniards came. We lose sight of the essential fact of Mexico, commercially as well as socially, if we lose sight for one moment of the lowest of the Mexican people. They present to us our first and greatest problem, whether we are traders, missionaries, or those who seek to develop Mexico’s resources or to sell her our goods. It is they who must buy our merchandise or aid our work or operate our factories, mines and oil wells. They were, and are, a vast potential market, a great, slow-moving force for us to re-shape by education into an advanced people, civilized, progressive, using the products of the world and pouring their own products back into the stream of commerce. They offer us an immense, a wonderful well of labor, perhaps a greater contributant to the nation’s future wealth than anything else in all Mexico. Because of these potentialities and because of our inability to understand why such possibilities do not find their development, it is vital that we look, clear-eyed and sympathetically, on the one great and overwhelming factor in that hopeless inertia--the ignorance of the mass of the Mexicans. Mexico is a land of innumerable children. A land where there are twice as many children under ten years old as there are in the United States (in proportion to population). And a land where not one child in six has even the chance to go to school, because there are no schools for them.