The story of Yucatan is no mere tale of the by-play of revolution, the “fortunes of war” or the “necessary accompaniments of a great social upheaval.” It is the history of the deliberate looting of a commonwealth and of an indispensable international industry. In the name of socialism, shouting the battle-cries of the age-long struggle for human freedom, Mexican revolutionary leaders turned the richest agricultural state of Mexico into a desert waste, prostituted the only creative industry in the whole country to the looting of the world’s farmlands and the taxing of every loaf of bread consumed in the world. The vast tribute which thus poured into the coffers of revolutionary government was utterly lost to public vision almost before it had left the market-places, and not one cent of it was ever turned to the easing of the sorry human burden of the Mexican peon or devoted to the education and upbuilding of the Mexican people. The story of Yucatan is the story of as gruesome a rape of Mother Earth as man has known. Beginning with the familiar picture of the downtrodden peon of the Diaz time, it runs the gamut through the marching armies of conquerors, through a cycle of high-sounding socialism to bloody oppressions, and on to a newer despotism and finally to utter economic collapse. In the end it flattens down into the present, an era of capitalistic struggle in which the state, by the laws of economics which its despots perverted so vigorously, is being ground between the millstones of opposing forces of the very business which was once the source of all its wealth and all its progress. Upon the wheat crop of the world depends the life of the world, and upon the mechanical harvester depends, literally, the life of the modern wheat industry. In its turn, the operation of the harvester is dependent upon the millions of miles of binder twine which alone make possible the handling of the wheat on its way from the standing fields to the thresher which converts it to golden grain. Since Cyrus McCormick first offered his “reaper” to the American farmer, more than fifty years ago, invention has sought far and wide for freedom from the need of twine for the binding of the sheaves, but neither “header” nor mechanical flail has been able to achieve it; to-day the wheat farmer must have twine, and that by the hundreds and millions of pounds, to harvest his crop.