I have advocated the union of the forces of American missionaries and American corporations in Mexico. I believe that this will bring great good and will eventually, as it has done in this country, bring a higher efficiency of labor and a larger market for the things which this country can export to Mexico. The desertion of the masses by the revolutionary government and the exile of the natural aristocracy, have brought the human problem of the country home with tremendous force to the foreigners. It lies to-day almost solely in their hands, and seems likely to wait long for a rescue or aid from any other source whatever. For the missionaries, education and improved economic conditions amongst the workers is indispensable--they are the tools and the signs of their great plan of regeneration. For business, the encouragement of religion and education which the mission schools give promises that improvement in the laboring population and in the buying capacity of that population which is demanded by the advancement of their business. Somehow that buying population which I have set at 3,000,000 must be increased. Somehow the efficiency of the laboring group (which numbers little more than the buying public) must be increased. Only one way is open--to make the masses better men, happier men, more cultured men. The ignorance of Mexico, the inefficiency which results from that ignorance, the low standard of living which keeps the people from those “wants” which make luxuries into necessities and so improve trade by widening the eddies of demand--all these affect us all in Mexico. Trade follows education. It follows the missionaries of business and of religion. It thrives alone on the prosperity of peoples. To-day these factors of trade in Mexico are only depressants--in the future they must and surely will be changed slowly into booming creators of trade. But so long as the chief item of import is food and so long as the productive capacity of the Mexicans is only half developed, so long will the market in Mexico swing at its lowest ebb. FOOTNOTES: [4] _The People of Mexico._ Mexican health is treated directly in the chapter on “Vitality,” pp. 86-109, and indirectly in the chapter on “Climate,” pp. 131-151. CHAPTER IV THE CREDIT OF MEXICO AND OF THE MEXICANS The Mexican government to-day is bankrupt, and Mexican business is bankrupt. The most sanguine propagandists of the revolutionary governments can offer nothing better than promises to offset the obvious facts of Mexican finance. The government to-day owes nearly a billion dollars--including unpaid interest on her debts for eleven years. Commercial credit has reflected the ghastly vision of government bankruptcy, because the ingrained principle of Mexican politics has been the subservience of economic progress to political exigencies.