victims. President Wilson takes care to mention that he will be unable to protect them or their interests. This statement, coming after the Benton murder and the outrages on Spaniards, is tinged with irony." Another Paris paper, the Liberté," says that the turn of events exposes Frenchmen in Mexico to more danger than before, and cynically expresses the belief that President Wilson's action regarding Huerta was taken to divert attention from some of our Administration's political problems.

Even in Great Britain there is some adverse criticism. In the declaration that the military operations of the United States are being taken, not against the people of Mexico, but against General Huerta, says the 'Globe," "we have the root weakness of President Wilson's policy. He undertakes to say who does and who does not represent the Mexican people. That is a pretension to which there is no other issue than annexation or a protectorate as valid as that now exercised over Cuba."

The Manchester "Guardian" thinks President Wilson was wrong in refusing to recognize General Huerta, and that the resulting intervention will put Pancho Villa in the position Huerta now occupies, which is "not an attractive prospect, for Villa possesses in a higher degree every fault that President Wilson has found with Huerta."

It is a satisfaction to turn from comment like the above to that tinged with pro-American sympathy. First of all is the London "Times's" criticism. It recognizes that our Government is not actuated by selfish motives, and says: "Americans will certainly find nowhere a clearer comprehension of the difficulties of the situation and warmer wishes for success in overcoming them than among their British kinsmen." To this the London "Daily Mail" adds:

There can be no mistaking the British attitude toward this fateful development. It is one of admiration for the tolerance and self-control with which Mr. Wilson employed all the resources of diplomacy to avert the crisis which, in spite of his earnest endeavors, has now overtaken him. It is one of unstinted sympathy with the American people in the difficult and laborious undertaking which lies unescapably ahead of them, and it is also one of absolute confidence not only in the success of the American arms by land and sea, but also in the spirit of practical good will which the American soldiers' administration will bring to bear upon the redemption of Mexico, as they have already

brought it to bear upon Cuba, Porto Rico, and the Philippines.

Intervention has been thrust upon the Americans, and they may be sure of the good will of the whole English-speaking world in facing the unsought-for task and its incalculable consequences with all the energy and resolution at their command.

The London "Daily News" says that "it is impossible to ignore either the difficulties or dangers of the American task, but it is only fair to recognize that "President Huerta's maladroit impudence has not left President Wilson any alternative but intervention.”

Again turning to Germany, we find the semi-official Government organ, the Cologne "Gazette," reflecting the attitude of the German Government and of the best German and other European papers as follows:

The American Nation, which since the days of Porfirio Diaz has been kept in a state of constant anxiety over the Mexican question, earnestly wishes peace and quiet on its southern frontier and the establishment of a government which will not imperil the colossal interests which America has created on the Panama Canal. Huerta has amply proved that he is not the man to furnish such guarantees. He has, on the contrary, acted as an enemy of the United States and has shown that he wishes to be considered such. He knows that President Wilson desired to resort to force against him only as a last resort, and in full realization of the latter's pacific intentions Huerta has pursued a policy of antagonism which has gradually become intolerable to the American people. There is therefore no doubt that President Wilson's procedure causes satisfaction to his countrymen.

From the point of view of German interests the course events have taken in Mexico of recent years has been only a source of regret. If the intervention of the Americans is destined to restore peace and order, there will be in it nothing objectionable from our point of view. The German nation, at any rate, has no occasion to oppose the action of the United States in any spirit of malicious criticism, which would not only be futile, but also injurious to our good relations with America.

Perhaps the most influential of the German Radical papers is the "Frankfurter Zeitung." It declares that President Huerta's demand is an undisguised mockery of the United States, and adds: "It goes without saying that Washington cannot tolerate this. Nobody can reproach President Wilson if he now abandons his reserve and proceeds against Huerta with a blockade and an occupation of Mexico's harbors."

W

HEN you alight from the trolley car that crosses the International Bridge from El Paso to Juarez, you step back three hundred years. If you are not aware of this fact, you will learn it before you have been long in Mexico, and the lesson will be painful in the same ratio as the height of your preconceptions of the intelligence and trustworthiness of the native Mexican.

I held certain rather idealistic theories concerning Mexican character when I joined the crowd that floated down Calle Commercio past the gambling palaces where Americans nightly leave enough gold to make superfluous anything more than a casual working of the mines of Mexico. Some of these theories succumbed to the shock of my first contact with Mexican civilization.

Before a pool-room whence floated the click of billiard balls and the strains of "Un Peu d'Amour "sat an old, gray-haired woman on a lop-sided canvas bag, while beside her stood a man evidently a few years her senior and a girl of about twenty of that astonishing blonde type of beauty with which nature sometimes blesses the daughters of Spain. They were three of the Spaniards of Torreon exiled by order of General Villa. Matching their feeble English with my meager Spanish, I learned that the old man had held property in the neighborhood of Torreon worth six million pesos (about three million dollars at the ordinary rate of exchange), that this had been confiscated by the Constitutionalists, and that the entire wealth of the family now consisted of six hundred pesos, which the graybeard carried in a money belt, and of the few household effects in the canvas bag.

"What we will do I do not know," said the patriarch, "but I suppose we are lucky to be alive. Before he had sentenced us to leave the city which our industry had built, Villa, the butcher, came to us where we were huddled in the Laguna Bank and said, 'I would like to kill you all with my own hands, and I could easily do it, but I won't for what the outside world would say.'

"What will become of us only God knows." Never mind, father. I can work in a department store and support you and mother," spoke up the girl.

"Don't you let her do that, Señor," said an American newspaper man who had come up behind us and heard most of the conversation. "You don't know what that means."

"Oh, she'll be all right," said the old man in simple confidence, as we moved toward a street car bound for the United States.

The reporter and I got on the car with them, and while I talked with the mother and daughter the newspaper man made further vain efforts to persuade the father against the department-store plan of livelihood. When we reached the bridge over the stream that deserved the name Rio Grande until numerous irrigation ditches had reduced it to a mere trickle of water winding through flats of caked mud, the old man stood up. As we passed the international boundary post halfway across the bridge he took off his hat.

"Thank God, I'm in a civilized country," he said, simply.

We took off our hats too, but said nothing as we thought of the department store.

It is one of the maddening perplexities of Mexico to the foreigner that he never can feel sure of the native. After seeing an instance of cruelty like Villa's treatment of the Spaniards he is apt to come upon a case of utmost chivalry and courtesy.

General Venustiano Carranza, Primer Jefe (First Chief) of the Constitutionalist cause, and some of his immediate followers are the kind of Mexicans that make you believe that most of the unkind things said of the race are pernicious falsehoods.

I saw General Carranza several times in his office in the barnlike Custom-House at Juarez, but my real acquaintance with him began the morning that the First Chief and his staff took the train at Juarez for Chihuahua, which was to be given the honor of becoming the seat of the Provisional Government.

Promptly at seven o'clock, the appointed train time, the American correspondents were on hand in Juarez station, but, according to best Mexican custom, the train did not start for five hours. About eight o'clock some soldiers pushed up the General's two automobiles, both handsome and expensive machines, and loaded them onto a flat car, while an aeroplane, a safe, several desks, and other office furniture were loaded into other cars.

An hour later several hundred soldiers with their families-a Mexican never campaigns without his women and children-climbed inside of and on top of box cars, where they stayed during the entire journey of a day and a half, cooking, eating, and sleeping in these uncomfortable and insecure positions. At the expiration of another hour several staff officers arrived, their uniforms ranging all the way from dirty khaki to brilliant salmon velvet. Then came dashing up on a black horse Felix Sommerfeld, "the Man of Mystery," press agent of the Revolution, who knows where the best rifles and machine guns can be bought at bargain prices. He it is who has organized the Publicity Bureau of the Revolution, in accordance with the most approved methods of modern big business. He assured the correspondents that the "Jefe" would arrive in "un momente," and in an hour Carranza came, in a carriage with two officers and his secretary.

There was something pathetic in the sight. of the tall, dignified man with the high forehead, long gray beard, smoked spectacles, and huge spade-shaped nose, that are his distinguishing features, walking to the train between the ranks of boy "soldiers," some of them hardly higher than their rifles.

As we wound and twisted through the desert of cactus, mesquite, and blazing sand, far ahead on the horizon we occasionally saw the smoke of two pilot-engines, while from time to time a group of armed horsemen would show against the sky-line of the sand dunes in the distance. The General was taking no chances.

It grew hotter, and the soldiers dropped their rifles and heavy cartridge belts carelessly on the floor of our car and stretched across seats for the accustomed siesta. The officers opened bottles of beer, spilled most of the fluid and drank the rest noisily. For miles there was nothing but desolation, twisted rails, the ruins of burned cars, and here and there a half-demolished adobe house near the railway or off at the foot of the seamed and puckered sand mountains, whose saw-toothed tops marked each edge of the valley. Every where were the scars of war. At the same time wherever there was a house that had escaped destruction it was inhabited, and the inhabitants were busy trying to coax a meager crop out of the parched soil, with as much confidence as if the last three crops had not been stolen by soldiers.

Presently the desert became a plain cov

ered with scant, short grass on which lean cattle grazed, and haciendas surrounded by adobe walls became increasingly frequent. Beyond this plain the train shot into a valley as fertile as the first one had been barren, and between rows of tall, full-leaved cottonwoods we rolled into the village of Ahumada.

The whole town was out to welcome us and had patiently waited there lined up before the station since the scheduled time of arrival, five hours before. In the first row were swarthy soldiers on ragged little ponies, Winchesters and Mausers resting on the men's thighs. Behind them were the old men of the village and the heroes of former battles, some with wooden legs; and in the next row were mothers and grandmothers holding up babies so that they could see mi General as he stepped off the train.

The reception at Ahumada was duplicated at every village along the railway. Carranza was careful to disappoint none of the people who had waited so patiently for a glimpse of the rebel hero. Through an oversight of the conductor the train ran by the little village of Ojo Caliente without stopping, but the General ordered the train backed fully a mile that he might speak to the score of school-children who waved Mexican flags and sang patriotic songs like good Carranzistas.

When it became apparent that we could not make Chihuahua before nightfall, it was decided to spend the night at Moctezuma, a small village whose best boast is a Chinese restaurant. It made no difference that a night on the train of freight cars and secondclass coaches meant considerable inconvenience, the people of Chihuahua wanted a daylight reception, and they should have it. So, after the Chinamen's store of "chuck" had been exhausted, the General wrapped himself in his cloak and stretched upon a couch in his car, his officers lay down on the car floor, the soldiers and their families made themselves comfortable on the sloping roofs of the box cars, while we Americans and a few officers of lesser importance ripped up the backs of the benches in the coaches and, placing them across the spaces between seats, made ourselves beds superior to those of either the soldiers or their General. Isidro Fabela, Acting Secretary of Foreign Relations in the Provisional Government, a Mexican gentleman of the best type, who speaks Eng lish even to slang, came through the car and. looking over the destruction, remarked that (Continued on page following illustrations)