Page:The Mexican Problem (1917).djvu/158

102 as a man began to stagger he was grabbed by the doctor's assistants and quickly dragged away from the well so that the doctor might promptly restore him by gas antidotes, and before he had finished his explanation the two Mexicans had moved a giant hose to the ship's side and the ship was being filled by gravity from a tank on the hill, some fifteen hundred feet away. The next day the ship departed with her sixty five-thousand-barrel load.

But what is the poor newsman to do with a press report when it arrives. It may or may not be true. In this case there was no strike of oil ship loaders, but for a few days there was trouble and a labor strike at the Pierce Oil refinery and at the Mexican Eagle refinery, but the true news could not be given. Now, if you were a newsman on the firing line, would you send forth a report, if permitted, indicating delays in some oil shipments from Tampico, or would you wait till order had been restored, the censorship lifted and then telegraph a history of no value?

The point, however, I wish to make for investment interests should be clear. Mexico as