I would, if I could, paint a different picture, but the half lights of such a panorama can be added only after the dull background has been set in. And that background is dark indeed. The panorama of misery begins when one crosses the northern border to-day. There the scattered but once almost happy villages of other times have been replaced by ruined, roofless railway stations lined with starving vendors of food who fight with the bony dogs for the refuse of the very food they sell. All the long trip to Mexico City is marked by the same voiceless suffering, and the capital itself has a dismal dinginess that cries of hopeless misery, in appalling contrast to the gallant days of the Diaz “materialism.” The unhappy toll of war and revolution, one says? Yes, in part, for such “war” as Mexico has known always takes that toll and always, too, from the weaklings, putting starvation and sickness and filth and dismay where once were comfort and health and some cleanliness and happiness. But, again the question, was it not worth the price, will it not be worth the price, in the victories won for human freedom? And here the answer is unequivocably “No.” Many hoped, with the fine faith of their own sincerity, that the upheaval which followed Diaz was the dawning of a new era. But in that hope even those who knew Mexico forgot the Mexicans and their history. Political independence from Spain had been won, freedom from the domination of religious bigotry had been won, before Diaz came. The struggle of his day was one of uplift, carried on with faulty tools, perhaps, but slowly reaching toward the light. Living was improving, slowly; religion was improving, slowly; education was advancing, slowly. Then came a period of crystallization; the Diaz oligarchy grew old. Many sincere men, inside and outside Mexico, thought that the advance could and should move more rapidly. Diaz repressed those hastening reformers, and the spiritual force which finally broke forth into the Madero revolution of 1910-11 was undoubtedly the result of that repression of progressive thought. Like all the revolutions of Mexico’s stormy history, this one began with a beautiful stating of ideals and of the unrealized needs of the common man; but as with all those other revolutions, the power passed quickly to the hands of men whose sole “ideal” was personal aggrandizement, personal wealth, and ruin to all whose needs might incommode these exalted “leaders.”