Then Carranza, riding upon the winged horse of Madero--it seems that not all of us understood, quite, for we heard the fair words, as we have heard them echoing through empty halls and across dead and tortured bodies these five years since. Many sincere men were caught by those fair, echoing words, and many followed the phantom to the end. And many continue to this day. I have no need to talk of the recent past, nor of the present. The story is written in the starving babies of the Mexican towns, in the dismal railway stations where wretched food can be bought (if one dares) from the very mouths of hungry, filthy vendors. Misery and grief and pain stalk in Mexico to-day. Somewhere those who have used these wretched bodies, as infinite in number, as minute in importance, as the skeletons of a coral reef, for climbing to wealth and power--somewhere these must make answer. In another chapter I shall tell something of the story of Yucatan, where the ideas of radical socialism were accepted and then used to destroy even itself. It is a story of horror and of wreckage, the clearest picture of Mexican conditions at their ultimate which has passed in the gory panorama of the recent years. What has happened in Yucatan is in essence what has been going on all over Mexico. In the larger field of the whole country, the revolutionists have been more coherent, and at the same time in their utterances somewhat more considerate of the prejudices of the world at large. Yucatan, isolated from the rest of Mexico, and free from the prying eyes of most of the world as well, has gone on with the round of despotism and oppression, rape and murder in the name of socialism, but on the mainland, the “rights of labor” have been more elaborately defended (in words) and the legal systems of confiscation and anti-foreignism have been more logically developed, under the standard of progressive socialism! The years have written records of Mexican political and social revolution which are identical with those of the present in all save their battlecries. The first outbreak against Spain in 1810 and the dozens of revolutions which followed it were a _reductio ad absurdum_ of the political ideals of Thomas Paine and the American and French revolutionaries. The Constitution of 1857, under which Diaz ruled, was little more than a copy of the Constitution of the United States, and few of its provisions were really adapted to Mexico’s peculiar conditions. So it is not strange, perhaps, that the Constitution of 1917 is as far from being Mexican and far more false an effort to solve the nation’s problems than was its predecessor, for it was dictated by foreign radicals and merely adapted by the Mexican politicians who knew best what would arouse enthusiasm in the Mexican crowd.