Page:Mexico and its reconstruction.djvu/106

88 order were made on the most remarkable of terms. The property might be heavily mortgaged to a neighboring bank, but the owner might at the same time have an equity representing a considerable capital. Nevertheless, in the face of the revolutionary storm, his first impulse was to save what he could and make his way out of the country to safety. He would sell his property at its former value accepting payment in depreciated paper at its face, pay off his mortgage to the bank in the same paper, and leave the country.

The result of such operations was peculiar, the adventurous buyer got the property for perhaps a twentieth of its real gold value, yet he paid a fair price in the money that the government was forcing the people to accept. The seller was equally well satisfied for he paid off his debt to the mortgagee under terms that the government itself upheld and he saved at least a little from ruin. The government, which had brought on these conditions and which through taking over the banks was under obligation to receive its own depreciated currency as the measure of the non-metallic assets, into possession of which it came by that act, was the only party to the transactions which might be disappointed. In the background, for the moment at least, were the former stockholders of the banks who saw their assets vanishing with only a hope that they might be reimbursed for their loss at some distant time.

The period of wildest financial inflation fell between October, 1914, and October, 1916. On the whole the course of all the paper issues was steadily downward. By the latter part of 1915 Vera Cruz bills, for example.