Ten years ago Mexico was one of the great, progressive nations of the world; to-day she is just “another Latin American Republic.” Then she showed literally the achievement and the promise of Japan; to-day she is as backward and as hopeless as Turkey. Ten years ago her diplomats were honored in the councils of kings, her credit ranked with that of the best of Europe, her cities were miniatures of Paris, her mines operated with the perfection of those in England, her railways and budding industries bore comparison with those of the United States, her people lived in arcadian peace, wakening slowly and surely, if sometimes painfully, to a civilization which was meeting their needs. To-day, Mexico is a little worse than Turkey, a little better than Hayti, her diplomats are as inconsequential as those of Thibet, her credit is as low as that of Austria, her cities and ports are mud puddles and pest holes, her mines are back to the rat-hole workings of the colonial Spaniards and Indians, her railroads are rattling skeletons, her industries virtually non-existent. Life is again arcadian, with all those discomforts of Arcadia which the poets of old and the propagandists of to-day neglect, so carefully, to mention. The world has learned, in these past years, to take colossal destructions calmly, so that few of us wonder and none of us really questions the fact or the why of Mexico’s sudden and astounding degeneration. And yet that failure is in miniature the threat and the promise of the failure of our civilization, in epitome the boast of bolshevism and the nightmare of capitalism. Mexico is like the Chamber of Horrors at the old Eden Musee or Mme. Tussaud’s, a row of illuminated pictures which tell in ghastly realism what is sure to happen to careless people if they play too recklessly with the world which is given them to use. This seems indeed a cycle of bolshevism, but it is a cycle in which radicalism, like capitalism, is a sorry victim. As a picture the events in Mexico approximate the drama in Russia, carried to the logical conclusions which such a drama would reach on any national stage where personal aggrandizement is a mightier lodestone than public devotion. The historical facts of the past decade in Mexico are unrelated to the facts and background of Russia, yet in Mexico there have been heard the same shibboleths, the same promises, the same cries of the downtrodden. There have been seen the same red flags, the same uprisings and assassinations, and the same “redistribution” of property as in Russia. And more than all has unrolled the drama of the rising of obscure chieftains and politicians to colossal and wicked power. But in Mexico the cycle has gone far beyond Russia, perhaps because here there has, indeed, been no touch of even such idealism as there may be in Moscow.