Already something has been done, by great American business concerns, and by American trade unions along the northern border and even within Mexico itself, to improve living conditions. But the terrific chasm of the Mexican mass remains utterly unplumbed, and the childhood of Mexico and the manhood and womanhood of Mexico wait, hungry because their food does not feed them; in discomfort because their long traditions do not let them even desire comfort; in sickness because of utter ignorance of the foundations of human health. Of this last a word must be written here. I have compiled, elsewhere,[4] the astonishing figures bearing upon this question, and have found, in the mass of Mexican official statistics, that the death rate of Mexican babies under one year is nearly twice that of the United States; between birth and ten years, three times that of this country, and that clear through the whole range of Mexican life, from two to four times as many Mexicans die in each thousand as die in the United States at the same ages. The average life of every Mexican born is but 15 years, while in the United States it is about 35 years, and half of the Mexicans born this year will be dead before they are 7 years old, while in the United States half of all the babies born will live to be 42 years old. High death rate means sickness. Experts estimate that for each death in the United States there are 300 days of severe illness and 6,000 days of indisposition or slight illness, spread over the average 35 years of American life. But in Mexico the average age of death is 15 years, so that the days of sickness must be crowded into less than half the space of time they cover in the United States. In Mexico, almost no care, as we conceive it, is given to the sick. The government reports show that only one-quarter of all the deaths reported in the country are listed as “classified by the doctor”--in other words, there is no medical attendance at all in three-quarters of all the fatal illnesses in Mexico. It is well known to those who know that unhappy land that in the case of illness, the priest and the doctor are sent for at the same time, the priest to administer extreme unction, the doctor to do what he can with a dying patient. This factor of ill-health in Mexico is one of the most terrible of all the pictures of her misery, perhaps the most potent element in the national ineptitude. No one who is continually ill can be greatly interested in progress, mental, or moral, or industrial, for illness is the greatest force working against the material advancement of the people and of the country. And upon material advancement, upon the increase of income and the increase of needs physical and cultural (as the money comes to procure them) we must build the solidity of the Mexican people that are to be, as well as the trade which we seek to gain from them.