There is in the Mexican railway law a provision for compensation in case the railways are taken over “for military purposes.” It is estimated that under this law the damages collectable are only $10,000,000 a year--less by $2,000,000 than the default in the fixed charges alone. The estimated $80,000,000 of physical damage (a mere estimate until an actual valuation can be made) is presumably collectable. The bill of the railroads is, however, as follows: Physical losses, $80,000,000; defaulted interest to June, 1921, $75,000,000; total, $155,000,000. It is believed that about one-third of the bonds are held by Americans, so that their loss is over $50,000,000. In addition, there has been an individual loss in the disposal of the bonds by small holders, at sacrifices as great as 80 per cent. It is even said that the Carranza government had hopes of being able to buy up the railway bond issue when its administrative policies had reduced the quotations to less than 30 per cent of par. Only the lack of money prevented this coup for real government ownership, it is said. In the above, I have treated only with the National Railways of Mexico. Outside of this system the only important lines in Mexico are the Mexican Railway (British owned) which has now been returned to the stockholders but without compensation for damages and the Southern Pacific in Mexico (American owned). The former suffered severe physical destructions, but the latter’s bill for damages, while heavy, sinks into relative insignificance. In the confines of a general study, space can not be given to the sidelights on the Mexican railway situation--a situation almost Teutonic in its colossal blunders, splendidly American in the elements which have gone to save it from utter wreck. The long years of patient railway building, the hundreds of miles of rock-ballasted lines across unproductive wastes, all done under American management, gave Mexico a system which has held together despite the wreckage of bandits and the ravages of time and neglect. The traffic of the nation moves to-day, not in the wheezy trains which the Mexicans maintain, but overwhelmingly in a system of privately owned locomotives and cars operated by the American mining and trading companies at staggering expense. Their 100 locomotives, in perfect repair (kept so in their own shops) and their nearly 3,000 freight cars probably represent half of the railway equipment running on the National Railways to-day, and they probably carry far more than half the freight. They pay full freight rates in addition to furnishing the trains, and although much of this equipment has been taken over by the government as this is written, it is no exaggeration to say that but for these American companies and their magnificent efforts to save what is to be saved of their Mexican properties Mexico would to-day be stagnant,--a land of chaos comparable only to the period of fifty years ago, before Diaz ruled.