It is such phases of the Mexican credit system of to-day which constitute the real damage claims against Mexico--claims which can hardly be estimated. I place the figure at $1,000,000,000, and yet its potentialities are far more than that. At the present moment the greatest actual loss--even though it can be partially repaired if the future develops sane government in Mexico--is in the virtual destruction of the market for property in Mexico. The new constitution and the decrees and laws under it virtually prohibit foreigners from owning anything in a vast restricted zone along the border and seacoast, a zone including the richest foreign holdings in Mexico. They prohibit foreigners from owning real estate anywhere unless they agree never to appeal to their home governments in case of trouble. The effect of this is to eliminate the only possible market for valuable property. The Mexicans, and particularly the Mexicans who are in control to-day, will not, need not, can not buy such properties--foreigners and the opportunities which were open to foreigners in Mexico before the revolution actually created the market value of such property, because they and they alone were the possible purchasers. Even well-developed small farming tracts cannot be sold to small Mexican farmers--such small farmers hardly exist as a class and where they do exist, their experience and their financial capacity do not lead them to consider the purchase of improved farms. And above all is the promise and the performance, in some cases, of the much-heralded land distribution of the revolutionary governments. Where men can get something for nothing, or on their own worthless credit, they do not buy in the open market. Aside from this destruction of the values of foreign property holdings in Mexico by making transfer virtually impossible, there is, once more, that omnipresent menace of confiscation which makes men seek privileges instead of their as yet uncertain legal rights, for the protection of what they have. No longer do men buy to develop--they take, as in the oil fields, only what is sure to return large profits in a very brief time, for they know that even if they have privilege, and think they know how to keep on having privilege for themselves, they cannot transfer their capacity for getting privilege when they seek to sell their property. There are no longer relative values of property, in Mexico--property is worth only what can be got out of it, and got quickly. This all makes up an uninspiring picture. But we must look on such pictures, must weigh and judge them ere we can see the way through and beyond them. That there is such a way must not be forgotten. It lies beyond the realm of mere political reform, for to-day, as all through the revolutionary history of Mexico the curse of the country is _the application of political remedies to economic ills_--that phrase should be burned into the brain of all who seek knowledge of the real Mexico.