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4 deemed to have had time to demonstrate its fitness to govern. While Mexico has never been free from revolutionary disturbances during this period, and not all the national territory has acknowledged Carranza's authority, a survey of present conditions should give a fair idea of the character and capacity of the Carrancistas and of what may be expected of them in the future.

The Mexican people being more vitally concerned than any one else their case should be considered first. To characterize their condition in a sentence, their existence for the last four years has been an unbroken crescendo of accumulating woes. Carranza and his adherents have destroyed the material prosperity of the country; have robbed the people to whom that prosperity was due of hundreds of millions of dollars; have reduced hundreds of thousands of their countrymen, once happy and contented workers in great industrial enterprises, to starvation; have dragged Mexico down to a depth of degradation and misery without a parallel even in the gloomy history of that unhappy country.

The Carrancistas' superlative power for evil is easily explained. Previous to the Diaz era the Mexican people were chiefly engaged in farming and stock raising, only to a limited extent in mining, and hardly at all in manufacturing industries. The looting and confiscation, always a