In Mexico the crimson day of bolshevism has been followed quickly by the purple twilight of the aftermath of graft and privilege. To-day there is to be seen there a power of wealth mightier than any which is conceivable in the now almost forgotten dawn of bolshevism’s red day in Mexico. Privilege and not the proletariat, capitalism and not socialism, are the gods of that stricken land,--a land which ten years ago was mistress of her life and of her destiny, and to-day is a beggar in the marts of the world, ready to sell her body and her soul for gold. I have no desire to force a parallel between the early events in Mexico and those in Russia. The parallel is there, and could fill the eye and mind with the aid of a modicum of imagination. But the facts alone are eloquent, and the primary fact is not whether the revolution against the czar was day for day and hour for hour a repetition of the Madero revolution against Diaz, or whether Huerta was an Indian Denekin, or Carranza a weak Lenin or Obregon the realization of what Trotzky might be to-morrow or next year. The first fact and the last is that in one great section of Mexico we have seen and in the whole of Mexico we are to-day watching the rolling on of an ugly spiral from plutocracy to revolution, from revolution to socialism, from socialism to bolshevism and then from bolshevism to demagogy, to a later and darker dictatorship, with a more miserable proletariat, and on into the vast sweep of an age of privilege which holds and wields power greater than government, greater and more direct than capital or labor has ever wielded. For privilege stands alone in the midst of the smoking ruins of what was once the Mexican nation. He braves much in this day who dares define or limit bolshevism, but in Mexico its manifestations have been carried to a point where they have limited and defined themselves. First, Mexican bolshevism was and is the application of political remedies to economic ills; second, it is the raising up of the proletariat by promises and agitation to the overturning of established government and the setting up, not of the promised millennium, but of new dictatorships and new oppressions. Both sought, and claim, the improvement of the workers, but both have failed and faded to shadowy appearance and raucous boast. In Mexico to-day there are spots where peace and progress reign--but they are literally those spots where “capitalism,” entrenched behind a wall of gold and foreign protection, has been able to give its workers the value of the profits which they gain. The rest of Mexico is worse off, politically and economically, than in the days of Diaz, and increasingly the only hope of the country seems, by some means, to achieve the extension of sane business to the replacement of the economic ruin of native demagogues masquerading behind the fair words of socialism.