Conditions in the oil country outside the private company towns are, however, deplorable, presenting a contrast which is not without its mighty lesson for us all. The graft and incompetence of the present ruling classes of Mexico have regarded the prosperous oil towns only as the most luxurious of posts for influential favorites. The educational conditions of Tampico, where in a city of more than 100,000 people there are only twenty government primary schools with an attendance of 4,500 pupils, beggars description. Yet the foreign companies have been called on regularly to support the Tampico schools, just as they are called on to pay for pavements, sanitation, etc. And this money has gone, hardly a single dollar into the work for which it was collected, but countless thousands into the bottomless pit of revolutionary graft. But for all the unfortunate conditions of the moment, the possibilities of the foreign corporations aiding in the uplift of the Mexican mass throughout the country is one of the encouraging phases of the Mexican trade and business problem. It links up definitely with the solution (on which we shall touch, in later chapters) of the parts of the question which deal with other elements than the human equation. The beginning which has been made in Tampico, chiefly by the great American companies, carries with it an import far greater than the mere contrast between their trim little company villages and schools and the ugly squalor of the Mexican towns. Somehow, out of the dark present, American business has learned how closely it is linked with the welfare of the human element in its scheme. They have learned how the simple man, how his happiness and prosperity, are wrapped up with the prosperity and success of every enterprise which remotely touches him. Until these recent years, and through these American corporations, there has never been scientific welfare work in Mexico, there has never been considerate treatment of the workers, little study of their weaknesses and their needs. If we contemplate that, in its bare truth, we can begin to understand something of the importance of even the relatively little work which has been done of late. Perhaps the greatest potentiality of the future of the human side of the Mexican market lies in the broad extension of that genuinely American attitude toward the masses of the country.