Looking back to the Diaz day we can find, for instance, the slow, constructive work toward the creation of arable land for small farms. It was being hampered somewhat by grasping office-holders, but it was advancing, a great national plan of irrigation to make possible the use of small tracts in a country where rain conditions have forever made small farming all but impossible. Then the revolution and the resounding cry for “land.” The alleged land hunger of the Mexican Indians and peons has been at once the rallying cry for each succeeding revolution and the one appeal of all of them for foreign sympathy. But whatever authorities may conceive as to the facts of the existence of this land hunger or of the forms which it takes--a desire for little farms, for prehistoric communal ownership, or for property only because it is wealth and can be converted into cash--it is also true that the schemes of the revolutionists for land distribution have been impossible except by the confiscation of rich properties and the destruction of vested rights. Obviously, no land which is not tillable is satisfactory for distribution, and the tillable land of Mexico is, as I have pointed out, actually only about 25,000,000 acres, or one-twentieth of the area of the country. Land distribution must long remain largely a beautiful theory, good only for raising up the natives by direct appeal to their bitter poverty or to their human greed, and for the raising up of foreign sympathy by the flaunting of the misfortunes of the soil under more appealing names. In Mexico to-day all these dreams of land distribution have gone the way of other “reforms” for the benefit of the peons. Nothing, virtually, has been done. Some great properties have been confiscated, or “paid for” in unguaranteed bonds of bankrupt state governments, but most of such properties are to-day in the hands of former revolutionary “generals.” Some few have been distributed to Indians, but even these tracts are taken with but scant enthusiasm. One great “land distribution” in Yucatan called forth a crowd of 6,000 to the festival (all Mexico goes to any _fiesta_) but only thirty Indians took up any of the hundreds of small tracts offered.