Page:Margaret Shipman - Mexico's Struggle Towards Democracy (1927).pdf/41

 ers, 119 million dollars. The English possessed large investments in metal mining. The French dominated the textile industry. The Americans exceeded the English in mining, owned about 650 million dollars in railroad stocks and bonds, and 100 million dollars in national bonds, banks, and land. The action of the Mexican government in opposing Harriman's railroad merger, and in granting Lord Cowdrey very favorable oil concessions may have disgruntled some American investors. There is some testimony that Madero in his struggle for power received financial backing from certain American bankers and from Standard Oil interests. Be that it may, at the outset, most of the investors were satisfied with the Diaz regime. Later, the competition for the oil fields, which rapidly grew in value, caused a schism among American investors and a struggle between American and English oil investors.

The chief official leaders of the revolution were members of the upper middle class, land owners, industrialists, men who had filled important political and military positions. They represented the Mexican property owners who felt that Diaz had discriminated against them in favor of foreign investors. The sub-leaders, those actually in contact with the masses, and who came into more and more prominence as the struggle advanced, were men of the working class, educated reformers, and small dispossessed property owners, often illiterate but spirited men, who sought freedom in the hills, as "bandits."