Despite its beauties of theory and its direct appeal to the serious radical thought of the world, its most useful function is becoming obvious even to the most credulous, for it gives the governing groups that control of Mexican life by which it is possible for them to sell the privilege of doing business, because the ancient rights of business are utterly done away with. The ills of Mexico are essentially economic, and the new constitution and its revolutions, even more than their predecessors, have sought to apply only the political remedy, a remedy which has so far served only to destroy the efficiency of the economic machinery of the country and place it upon the auction-block of graft. To-day all over Mexico, labor is paid higher wages than it ever received, but it is paying more for its food and shelter than it ever spent before. The misery of Mexico is just as obvious and as unescapable as ever to him who sees truly. Save for those sections where foreign business still survives the Mexican lives as he has always lived, on the verge of pauperism. And upon the summit of the heap, lounging in easy magnificence, is the mixed-blood agitator, the general, the governor, the cabinet official who have battened on Mexico’s misery before this day and will doubtless do so long after this day is passed. The raising of the Indian masses of Mexico by promises and by high-sounding battlecries is a game as old as Mexican history; it is played with unvarying success year after year and generation after generation. The more extravagant the promises, the more complete the enthusiasm of the “proletariat,” both for the political movement of the moment, and for the one which follows it immediately upon the discovery by the unfortunate “people” that the previous promises are not going to be kept. But in to-day’s orgy of revolution, Mexico has gone further toward destruction than she has ever gone before. Values throughout native Mexico are almost non-existent, and the wheels of Mexican civilization like the wheels of the wheezy locomotives of her railways, creak and groan on their rounds. The nation’s economic life is tied together by strings, and what remains is only what has been salvaged from her junk-heaps, and like the lawn-mower borrowed from a neighbor, is kept running only to serve the purposes of the borrower. The seventy years of warfare before Diaz left intact the civilization of the Spaniards for Diaz to revive, but the ten years from Diaz to Obregon have torn that civilization to shreds. Nearly all that Diaz built has disappeared, and to-day the business of Mexico is swapping jack-knives and selling food and shelter at the highest prices the traffic will bear.