Page:Mexico under Carranza.djvu/72

56 states of Tlaxcala, Puebla, Morelos, Oaxaca, and Chiapas were entirely under the control of opponents of the Carranza government. Furthermore, in his call for the election, First Chief Carranza expressly provided that the elective franchise should he exercised only by those citizens who were known to have been the supporters of his revolutionary party. Thus, we have the spectacle of the chief of a movement which he denominated the "Constitutional Party," pledged to the restoration of the constitution of 1857, deliberately throwing that instrument upon the scrap heap and assuming to enact a new constitution for the whole Mexican nation by a convention whose members did not represent several states of the Mexican federal union and were in no sense the representatives of all the citizens even in the states in which the election was held, because, by the very terms of the writ calling the election, a large number of those citizens were disfranchised. It has been stated, and I believe truly, that the votes cast for delegates represented less than 2 per cent. of the population.

A glance at some of the provisions of this new constitution will show how completely it violated, in every possible way, the pledges that had been made to our Government and the rest of the world by the Carranza party. Section XIV of Article 27 of the new constitution provides: