Page:Mexico under Carranza.djvu/247

Rh composing 80 per cent. of the population at the hands of the governing minority.

The stories told by representatives of the Red Cross and other recent observers, as quoted elsewhere in this volume, seem to show that nearly a century of so-called "popular government" in Mexico has left the condition of the peon very much where it was when the government of Spain ended. During that period he has been appealed to for his support by more than a hundred leaders of revolution and each appeal promised him an amelioration of his condition. That the promises have not been made good by the last revolutionary leader, the Latin-Mexican chief of the party now in power, appears to be very fully established by evidence that cannot be disregarded. Looking back from his present pitiful condition, through the history of four hundred years, the peon can say with Prometheus:

"No change, no pause, no hope! Yet I endure."

I cannot believe that the salvation of the Mexican peon can be brought about in any way other than that in which corresponding changes have been wrought in other countries similarly situated.

What Mexico needs, and what I believe she must have, is the intervention in her affairs of some saving power such as England has afforded to Egypt and our own nation has afforded to the Philippines, and to Cuba, in a degree, under the authority of