The essential facts of the Mexican situation are patent to all who go to Mexico to-day, and they are inescapable to those who have a background of knowledge of Mexico by which to judge of what they see. And yet it is true that in the councils of Carranza, in the entourages of de la Huerta and of Obregon there have been men representing forces which we in our time have felt could not be used to evil purpose. These were men who had been stirred by the fine frenzy of the first revolution, and whose ideas, caught as mere phrases by the leaders of revolts, were handed back to their originators again, as the “ideals” of the revolution. Strange indeed it is, and yet not only newcomers, but foreigners of long residence and sincere and devoted Mexicans as well, fell victims to that subtle flattery. In business, in education, in the churches, there were such men, their very hopes too great to protect them from the petty deceits of those who climbed to power upon them. I think I can understand why travelers in Mexico, sincere students as well as moistily entertained excursions of American “Chambers of Commerce” can be deceived as to conditions there. I have been inclined to be impatient with those who let themselves be led this way and that, and flattered by the apparent sincerity of self-deluding Mexican officials, but Mexico is, after all, an eternal enigma. It is an enigma because its colossal depths of ignorance and the smallness of its deceits are literally incomprehensible to simpler and less subtle minds. It is that enigma which I have sought through all my writing on Mexico to resolve. On my last trip through the country, I saw just the eternal Mexico, the Mexico of ignorance and misery, whose only change was that it was a little sadder, a little more resentful of those whom it once regarded as its helpers and its friends, a little more pompous in parading its borrowed intellectual plumage. A most perfect example of this ability of the Mexican of the “modern” type to absorb one’s ideas and deceive one by the redishing of those ideas, happened to me on my last trip to Mexico City. In the course of the preparation of an article on a great business for a popular magazine, I met a Mexican _licenciado_ (a title of vast elegance, meaning much more than its dictionary equivalent of “lawyer”) who was extremely anxious to be quoted as an expert on the subject which I was studying. He evidently thought that my quoting him would help him to a government post to which he aspired, so he expounded his ideas at great length. When he was finished, I answered his arguments in kind, and with considerable interest in his response to my counter-play. He was pleasantly combative, and we parted in thorough friendship.