The so-called “social revolution” of Mexico borrowed the battle cries of European socialism, but in the land in which it worked it stirred up only a tempest in a teapot, with the miserable masses of the country serving as tinder and fuel beneath the vessel. The teapot is the diminutive organized labor world of Mexico, and that is boiling more violently, perhaps, than elsewhere. But to-day the “advanced” ideas of Mexico serve, in the name of socialism, only to put sweeping power into the hands of unscrupulous men, men who know and care nothing of the responsibilities of power, and are using it only to the destruction of the very bases of Mexican society. Thus, while there seems to be a light dawning in the labor world of Mexico, I am not sure that the light does not come from the burning of something which Mexico cannot afford to lose. In that organized labor world there are fewer than 50,000 workers out of a population of 15,000,000, while there are more than 3,000,000 peons, heads of families, who work, when there is work, in the fields, or as common laborers. It is upon the continued, unbroken suffering of these 3,000,000 that the 50,000 profit to-day--the peons have but changed masters once again and in the name of freedom, now, serve a vaster company. The Mexican leaders, drawing their power in turn from the coherent, organized industrial workers, are to-day destroying the civilization of Diaz, and with it the civilization of American business men, American teachers and American missionaries, which was and is the hope of the downtrodden majority. The “modern” laws which labor has promulgated might, we may conceive, fit the advanced industrial life of Germany or the United States, but they are utterly suicidal to Mexico. The new Constitution of 1917 has written into its fabric an idealistic set of labor laws, beautiful in terminology but under present conditions of industry and psychology and government in Mexico, about as impractical for the development of industry and the true welfare of labor as they are efficient as a means of graft and extortion against labor as well as against employers. These laws are worked out for the sole benefit of the industrial workers of Mexico, that total of less than 50,000 as against the 3,000,000 farm and day laborers. They are thus far more important as a propaganda document with the foreign radicals who caused the inclusion of those administrative laws in the new national constitution than they are helpful to Mexico’s own social advancement.