In the past ten years we have seen in turn the appeal of political Mexico, to-day to the bolshevist, to-morrow to the Christian missionary, to-day to the thinking radical of the universities, to-morrow to the deep-dyed conservative of the counting room. Confusion has piled upon confusion until we have each seen in Mexico what we hoped or what we feared. We can only begin to see the truth, and in the truth the solution of the complicated Mexican problem, when we clear our minds of these old ideas that he who is against the revolutionary government in Mexico is a hopeless reactionary, and that he who is for it is a raving bolshevist. For the Mexican revolution is part of the “world revolution” only as the shibboleths of that vast upheaval have been turned to the aggrandizement of Mexican leaders who know neither what the phrases mean nor where they lead. If this is grasped, and if we will look at Mexico as a problem for us all, then the beginning of the road away from foreign intervention and the peril to our peace and Mexico’s will begin to open. Intervention can be avoided, even though it may be grievously close to-day. But it cannot be avoided until we see clearly that the issue of intervention, like the whole issue of the Mexican revolution, is not one of capitalistic interests against the unhappy Mexican peon, but a struggle of all the constructive thinkers and workers of the world--be they radical, socialistic, religious, philosophical, laborite, capitalistic, industrial or social, be they American, English, French, Russian or Mexican--against forces of greed and ignorance which turn every ideal of honest men to the prostitution of their country and the exploitation of their fellows within and without its borders. CHAPTER VII THE RAPE OF YUCATAN From the golden wheat fields of Kansas to the barren sands of Yucatan, from the loaf of bread on your table to the loot of Mexican revolutions--these seem mighty leaps of imagination or of fiction. Yet the link is closer than imagination could ever forge, the analogy a stranger tale than the yarns of Captain Kidd. The modern industry of wheat farming depends, by one of the romantic balances of world commerce, upon the supply of binder twine for the mechanical harvester, a supply which comes alone, to-day, from the cultivation of a humble cactus plant in far-off Yucatan. The great Mexican industry of raising this henequen or sisal hemp was prostituted by Mexican revolutionists to the manipulation of the binder twine market so that in four years more than a hundred million dollars in artificially inflated prices were dragged from American farmers. Thus it was that through the helpless years of the Great War, all who ate the bread of the wheat, from you and me in America to the starving children of Belgium, paid bitter tribute to the greed of Mexican agitators.