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222 which, for the most part, go to make up the Mexican people, are stocks which have behind them a great record of human endeavour. It is unnecessary in this place to dwell upon the question of what Spain has done for the world at large. As a great Spanish statesman has pointed out, Spain by damming back the conquering Moslem flood, sacrificed herself for Europe, which might otherwise have suffered from the retrograde influence of the conquering East. The story of aboriginal Mexico is not so familiar to British readers; but nowhere on the American continent had such a high standard of human progress been achieved as in the Valley of Anahuac, the civilisation of which was self-evolved, and, unlike the cultures of Europe, owed nothing to other sources.

That Mexico is slowly recovering her poise, or rather that she is organising herself for the first time, is vouched for by the fact that order has been restored in thirteen out of her twenty-seven States, that prohibition has been put into effect in several States, and that free schools have been established in scores of places where education was before unheard of. In Yucatan, for example, there are at present 2,400 teachers where, under the Diaz regime, there were but 200. In a number of the remaining fourteen States, a beginning of order has been made, the worst conditions prevailing in the State of Morelos, to the immediate south of the Mexican Federal district, where Zapata is still in control, and in the northern frontier State of Chihuahua, where conditions are unsettled on account of the presence of American troops. But law and order are surely beginning to prevail. In several States there is already provision for the equitable division of the great estates into smaller holdings; and arrangements are being made by the various State legislatures for just systems of taxation, and the New England system of co-operative welfare is being widely established.

Intervention in Mexican affairs on the part of the United States would be far more uncalled for than the unwarranted