Mexico, as most Americans do not realize, considers herself to have been at peace for the past five years, for the bandits were in the hills and most “revolutionary” outbreaks were being successfully nipped. Yet in the important city of Monterey, typical of the interior of Mexico, the damage done “in the revolution” remains untouched. On the main plaza the stones that are left of the beautiful old Casino, burned by Carranza’s soldiers six years ago, have barely been moved from the roadway. Smoke-stained shells of buildings rise here and there, and in the suburbs bullet-ridden windows still remain in fine private houses and factories. The once paved streets are full of unexpected bumps, the roads leading to the smelters and out into the country are cut deep with ruts and puddles and railway crossings are all but impassable, even to skipping Fords. The street cars limp and bump and leak, and the very civic improvements seem installed with a fatalistic certainty that they will soon be destroyed. There is industry and there is business in Monterey, each of a kind. In the old days there were two great smelters, foreign owned, a steel plant and a brewery, besides three railway shops and miscellaneous other factories. Most of the miscellaneous factories closed long ago, but the smelters and the steel plant kept going in good order--as long as war prices sustained them. Now, one of the smelters has closed, for London has ceased holding up the lead market, and the other (owned by the American Smelting and Refining Company) continues only because it uses the ore from its own mines. During the war the steel plant was handled by the United States War Trade Board, the great organization which harnessed our own industries to war needs, and 80 per cent of its product was, by agreement, sold in the United States and in Cuba--at war prices. When the war ended, the Monterey steel plant was forced to curtail, and to-day the great blast furnace is cold and only a Mexican government order for a few thousand tons of steel rails keeps the rolling mill moving. The railway shops are content with the most perfunctory of repairs, and are more remarkable for the appalling array of rusted and rotted engines (I have counted 150 engines out of commission in the Monterey yards) and for the wrecks of burned freight cars which fill their sidings than for any activity which inspires their machinery. The few factories which operate are sustained, in their turn, by the high prices which even the staples of existence command in Mexico. Three small cotton goods factories, reopened five years ago, get prices only a few cents below those paid for imported goods, to whose cost in this country is added a heavy import duty. The brewery keeps running, although it pays the government a tax of 100 per cent on its product--estimated to be $1,000 in American gold per day.