Page:Mexico and its reconstruction.djvu/266

248 $285,000,000; German, $75,000,000; and various, $190,000,000.

Whatever the total, it is natural that foreign countries should be anxious that the rights of their citizens should be given proper protection. It is also natural that Mexico should seek, by all proper means, to create conditions by which she can gradually make herself less dependent on capital from beyond her frontiers. Unfortunately, this desire has not at all times been accompanied by a determination to respect property rights already acquired.

Envy of the position into which the enterprise of the foreigner had carried him was by no means absent, even before the revolution. Mexico has welcomed the foreigner as the means of her salvation but she has been jealous of him also. She has wished to have the country profit by his individual initiative and example but, at the same time, she has wished to minimize his influence in the republic, and, if possible, make him drop his privileges as a foreigner and become subject to Mexican law exclusively. Mexico has welcomed foreign capital also, but she has sought to make it drop its nationality at the border. She has wished to secure its cooperation as capital, not as foreign capital. Toward both capital and the immigrant, in short, she has stood in an equivocal position. She has sought the benefits they could bring without being willing to assume the responsibilities that accompany those benefits.