It was only a few hours later that I had an urgent call from this same gentleman, who had, he told me, been going into new material on the subject, and wished to express his views, stated in the morning, more definitely to me. Whereupon he returned me, recooked and eloquently served, my own friendly contentions of the previous interview. It was a bit thick for me, but it is worth the telling that an American business man of long experience in Mexico who had introduced this gentleman to me remarked when the subject came up again, a day or two later: “By the way, Licenciado Blank is getting much broader. He has figured out a pretty decent attitude on this problem ...” and he redished me my own views again! This is Mexico to-day. On the top a group of men who have absorbed in just this way the phrases of the intelligent radicals of the world but who still remain, as always, sycophants without background of education, or even genuine radical convictions. Below them the vast misery of the unthinking serfs of the country, duller, certainly sadder and even less well nourished than in the days of the viceroys and of Diaz. We are all responsible for the Mexico which is before us. We Americans of every type in that old Mexico were too willing to let the misery of Mexico be what it was, were too willing to take our helpers and our support from the middle classes which were emerging so slowly. We made a fetish of that middle class, built our hope of Mexico upon it, called it the crowning achievement of the age of Diaz, and from it came the beginnings of that group of Mexican leaders of which we all had dreamed. We saw Diaz clear--all of us, I think--and knew that his day could not be forever. But we had faith in that middle class, forgetting, as it was easy to forget, the instability of that foundation of Indian poverty and misery. We were going to transmute those shifting sands by making more striking the examples of its brothers--artisans and clerks and students and teachers. We trusted so blindly, then, in the leaven of example--we knew so little of the sodden flour which made our loaves. And then came the day of revolution, Madero the deliverer. There were few of us who regretted the passing of Diaz, save sentimentally, that it should have to be in just that way--we had hoped he would die gloriously, beloved by the people for whom he had given so much. And then the disappointment and the horror of that wild cabal of graft and loot under Madero, when the dreamers, the repressed brains of a generation, stood waiting, wringing their hands in helpless impotence--those who could, truly, have done so much! It was pitiful, as was the aftermath of Huerta, the reaction, the impossible reaction with its ugly tinge of a coming uprush of Indian barbarism.