VI MEXICO AND HER “BOLSHEVISM” 128 VII THE RAPE OF YUCATAN 159 VIII THE ROMANCE OF MEXICAN OIL 196 IX THE GOLDEN GEESE 240 X THE HIGHWAY TO SOLUTION 258 TRADING WITH MEXICO CHAPTER I TRADING WITH MEXICO Three fundamentals determine and will determine American participation in Mexican trade. Excursions, however wet, will not change those fundamentals. Enthusiasm, however sincere, will not affect them. Above all, promises should not be taken into consideration in our cool judgment of them. American business men have never been noted for sentimentalism in their own country; they should not be sentimental in other countries. Let us take up the situation and look at it with the sane judgment we would apply to the question of selling, say, a new type of water meter in New York City. The three fundamentals of the Mexican trade question are not unique. They are, first, the Market; second, the Credit, and third, the Government and Laws under which trade must be carried on. Truly not original, and the astonishing thing about American business men who consider Mexico is that they apparently lose sight of them, and most of all lose sight of the emphasis which must be given to each. First, the Mexican market. Three phases again: the people, the industries and the need. There are 15,000,000 people in Mexico. Of these, 6,000,000 are Indians, and Indians that are comparable, literally, to our own reservation Indians in the United States, in the things they buy and the things they make. There are 8,000,000 mixed-bloods, a cross of Indian and Spanish, but of these 8,000,000 fully 6,000,000 are almost as Indian as their full-blood cousins. In other words, 12,000,000 out of 15,000,000 take and need nothing from the outside world excepting food, at those times, like the present, when they do not produce enough for their own needs. More than that, the money or goods which would pay for imported food for the 12,000,000 are created by the remaining 3,000,000--in other words, the actual market in Mexico is not 15,000,000 people but 3,000,000. The rest wear no shoes--only native tanned sandals. They wear no civilized clothes, only white cotton woven at home. They wear only home-made hats, the raw material the fiber of palm trees which grow wild. They have no need for culture, for houses, for travel. Remember, then, a buying population of 3,000,000.