This is the way the situation is expressed in cold figures. But Mexico is a land of infinite resource, both natural and diplomatic, and nations in worse condition than this have been taken in hand by great bankers and placed upon their financial feet. Any Mexican official can explain Mexico’s condition convincingly--the long years of revolution, the paralyzation of industry through destruction and through the prices and want brought to all the world by the Great War. It is therefore of no really deep significance, they say, that Mexico owes millions of dollars, and that she is to-day suing for favor in the world’s money markets. But there is a deep and fundamental cause which is back of her financial bankruptcy, back even of its merely economic causes in wrecked mines and abandoned factories, in ranches stripped of millions of head of cattle which bandits have killed for their hides. The real bankruptcy of Mexico goes deep down into the minds of men, Mexicans and foreigners, government officials and rabid interventionists alike. The bankruptcy of Mexico is a sickness born of broken faith, a moral bankruptcy that is ugly with human greed and hopeless with nervous fear. The trouble with Mexico to-day is that Mexicans as well as foreigners have ceased to believe in Mexico. At the time of my several recent visits to Mexico, I did not go as a stranger to the country. I had watched her develop during six years prior to 1910, under the peace and prosperity of the Diaz régime. Understanding something of the native psychology and much of that of the foreigners, I was prepared to find that a good deal of the seriousness of the situation was due to panicky fear and distrust one of another. What I was not prepared for was a condition where every incident, every situation, every tight-strung nerve of potential strength or weakness led down pell-mell paths to a deep ravine of utterly blasted faith not only in present conditions in Mexico, but in the possibility of the country’s ever crawling back to her old serenity and strength in any measurable time.