In recent months the great business groups in Mexico have opposed a certain amount of strength to the growing power of the auction-block of Mexican graft and privilege. The oil companies have from time to time offered a solid front to the encroachments of this marketing of the privilege of doing business in contraversion of the temporary laws of Mexico. They have held back, apparently, the crushing fall of actual enforcement of the confiscatory provisions of the Constitution of 1917, and they have, here and there, stopped the marketing of privilege--for brief periods. But looking at the whole picture, it seems as if the Mexican officials of the present era are in no greater hurry to enforce the confiscation than are the foreigners to have it enforced. The static power of those provisions, waiting to fall, is far more profitable to Mexican pockets than would be the sudden and final crash of their genuine application. Their enforcement would be of little value to the seller of privilege, for then he would have to invent another method of extortion. No, privilege will long remain upon the market counters of Mexico. It will remain there, in fact, until some means is found, within or without Mexico, for destroying the system which is so profitable. That need of change is the crisis of the business world of Mexico, the crisis of all who would do business with Mexico in the present or in the future. What, then, can save Mexico in this crisis? The panacea of the Obregon idea was certainly not a solution. Here indeed was a probably genuine desire to solve the problem in a final and glorious way. But the tools were but the tools of the old days of Carranza and the rest. That was a political remedy for an economic condition, and its promise was a sordid thing, an unworthy thing for Mexico or for the United States to expect. For the promise of Obregon was at first for reaction, a belief that Obregon was comfortably wealthy already or that his ambition was for power alone. Therefore he was to be the great conservative, who would save Mexico by slipping back to the days of Diaz. But reaction must always fail in the end. In this case it passed quickly, for this was a “reaction” which was part and parcel of the “radicalism” of Carranza, its power but a manifestation in another form of the same personalism, the same sale of privilege, which made Carranza impossible and in the end, brought him to his ruin.