The depth of Mexico’s ignorance, in childhood and in adulthood, in life and in business, literally passes comprehension. The active, curious minds of the Indian youngsters grow quickly into sodden stupidity; the keen and vivid intelligences of the children of the middle and upper classes expend their growing forces in sensuality and plunge themselves and their country into debilitating excesses--because there is no training to give them a life above the animals. I have seen, in the seats of government in Mexico, men who know less of world history than a boy in an American high school; I have talked with “experts” of government departments who knew less of their special subjects than did I, a layman. I have seen in the presidential chair men who believed, literally, that the shrunken, sick Mexico of to-day was one of the great, advanced countries of the world--because they had no conception of the development of world civilization. I have seen, in Mexican homes, the slow murder of Mexican babies, because neither I nor any one else could change the round of tradition, unrelieved by training of any sort, which takes an annual toll of child life in Mexico that is perhaps not surpassed even by the toll of the famine in China. The chain of tradition links Mexico together, and links her, too, to a past which goes back into the furthest reaches of prehistoric legend. The ways of modern agriculture are those of the early Aztecs, and modern tools, even, are introduced with the greatest difficulty. The round of life is a brief cycle of dull days, unlivened by any thought or knowledge beyond the confines of a village or a township or a few blocks of a city. The schools, such as they are, are patterned after models long abandoned everywhere else in the world, and are stifled by a traditional belief that war and revolution and the erection of imposing buildings are more important to the progress of the country than the education of its youth. All this has driven Mexico on through the years handicapped with a load of illiteracy that can well be recognized as the most potent factor in the degeneration that marks her every manifestation to-day. Only figures can tell, even in part, the depths of that ignorance. Back in 1895, the Mexican government reports (which one must always remember speak as favorably as they dare) showed that only 2,000,000 out of a population of 12,500,000 could read and write! This means that 82 per cent of all the people of Mexico were without these rudiments of learning. By 1900 this percentage had been reduced to 80 and in 1910 the Diaz government claimed that it had been reduced to 78, in other words that of the 15,000,000 population of that year, a little over 3,000,000 could read and write, while nearly 12,000,000 remained in the depths of their ignorance. In 1919, the Carranza government issued a report claiming but a slight advance over these figures in the nine years since the fall of Diaz.