Page:Face to Face With the Mexicans.djvu/548

542. Let our people make an effort to know the “Mexicans in their Homes," and an open hospitality be tendered to them when they visit our country. No diplomacy could be so effective.

As an American woman I am justly proud of our institutions, of our prowess, strength and unity of purpose. We have indeed left behind us in our onward march of progress every other nation, and are pre-eminently the "heirs of all the ages." No country nor clime can compare with ours, and our representative men and women take rank and precedence wherever they come in contact with those of other countries. Perhaps it is the consciousness of our greatness that makes us less adaptable than others.

But our modern progressive institutions cannot thrust themselves unceremoniously and without caution upon a country whose civilization dates back more than two hundred years before our own. We must learn to "apply our hearts unto wisdom and pass into strange countries, for good things were created for the good from the beginning."

We must educate ourselves up to the point of believing that we can attribute the frailties and defects of any people as much to human nature as to national forces.

Whatever our differences of race, training and feeling, we can all do something for the happiness and well-being of those around us, and if other opportunities fail, there is always room for the bestowal of a helpful and sympathetic word.

But in no country do fame and friends come to us unless we have earned as well as desired them. Usually, like success, they come as the hard-bought recompense of persevering effort, and of patient waiting, and at last must rest with ourselves. We must carry into our common lives that grand and ennobling sentiment that unless we trust we will not be trusted.

In brief, if you go to Mexico, do not hope to effect radical changes, or constitute yourself judge and reformer, but rather be prepared, instead of teaching, to be taught. Go determined to see things in a just light, to make liberal allowances for whatever does