It is literally true that not a tenth of all the people in Mexico have what we would call a common school education, and three out of four cannot read a street sign or scrawl their own names. Indeed, one great British mining company reported that of its 595 Mexican employees, including scores of what we would call skilled workmen, only six, or about one per cent could sign a receipt for the money they were paid. To those of us who look on through foreign eyes, this condition explains much of Mexico’s dilemma, and the point is further clarified when we know that the greatest claim ever made for Mexican education showed but 12,000 schools, with 850,000 pupils enrolled--while the population of children of school age was more than 4,000,000! No single issue is greater or more pressing than education. Yet education waits, as everything in Mexico waits, on peace and better times, on food and on health. And these wait--and more than all, from our selfish interest, business and commerce wait--on education! Around and around the problem swings, and each issue is dependent upon another, and that, then, upon the first. Of all the complicated, interwoven factors of Mexican life and of the tendencies, this very day, of Mexican business and trade none, however, offers so true an understanding as race. The basis of Mexico’s ignorance and the basis of her steel-bound traditions is Indianism. For Mexico’s 15,000,000 people include 6,000,000 pure-blooded Indians, of some fifty tribal strains, literal aborigines in their life and in their thoughts. There are, as I have noted, 8,000,000 mixed-bloods, three-quarters of whom are virtually Indians in their way of life and in their outlook upon the world. And there are only 1,000,000 of white strain, mostly Spanish, a group which is to-day without voice in the affairs of the country. Two-thirds of Mexico is Indian, and most of the other third a mixture of Indian and white, a mass with the dark Indian sea below it and virtually no light coming to it from above. To-day there sifts into the Mexican ruling classes--these same mixed-bloods--hardly a ray of culture, hardly a gleam of a truly broader outlook, to lift them and their people out of the dull cavern of their circumscribed life, or to lead them to the better things of modern civilization and commerce. We talk of the heathen of China, of the darkness of ignorance and superstition in Africa, but in Mexico the churches and the foreign industrial concerns seem to me to face a greater need than in any other country in the world. For Mexico is at our door, and the cultural traditions of Mexico are those of our own world, the white. For 300 years she was a subject state of Spain, and for all the mistakes of the Spaniards and the Roman Catholic Church, the foundation-stones they laid are as the foundation stones of our own life.