The answer to this proposition has been astonishingly to the point. No Mexican guarantee of customs receipts has interested the bankers unless it was backed by the United States government, presumably with a collection agency of American marines, as in Haiti and Honduras to-day. The most interesting development in answer to the Mexican suggestions of refunding was the appointment of one of the most impressive international banking committees ever created some three years ago. This was headed by J. Pierpont Morgan and announced that its purpose was “the protecting of the holders of securities of the Mexican republic and of the various railway systems of Mexico and generally of such other enterprises as have their field of action in Mexico.” It would seem that the probity of the Mexican government, both as to its debts and as to its willingness to repay the losses of foreign investors was slightly under suspicion in the financial circles of the world, a suspicion which is shared by no other Latin-American country save those in actual and admitted bankruptcy. FOOTNOTES: [5] E. D. Trowbridge. _Mexico Today and Tomorrow_, p. 198. CHAPTER V OUR BILL AGAINST REVOLUTIONARY MEXICO The American after-dinner orator roars his boast of “two billions of American dollars in Mexico” and moans his claim of “a billion of damage” done to those pioneer American dollars. Whereupon the Mexican (of whatever political complexion) wails protest that three-quarters of those American dollars were made out of Mexico herself, and our State Department, which alone might clarify the matter, perforce keeps silence. Up to the present time few have attempted to bridge the gulf between the orator and the Mexican and no one that gulf between the orator and the State Department. We live in an age of “convictions” and we choose our figures according to our beliefs. Fifteen years ago an American consul in Chihuahua, Marion Letcher, wrote a report in which he estimated (frankly without figures) that the total foreign investments in Mexico were $1,641,054,180, distributed as follows: American $1,057,770,000 British 321,302,800 French 143,446,000 Various 118,535,380 -------------- Total $1,641,054,180 These figures have been assailed, especially as regards the comparatively small sum alloted to the British, but they remain to this day the only official estimate available. I have, however, been able to find another compilation, worked out also by Americans, but this by the research departments of several large banking groups, with full access to all Mexican government figures and to the stock books of most of the great American companies. The total, which is for 1914, before the vast bulk of the investment in oil, is almost identical, but the distribution is startlingly different: