Page:The Mexican Problem (1917).djvu/26

xviii Island. My father's economic vision has never taken solid shape. Like visions, the world over, have been blasted. Why? Because economic development necessarily rests on courts that enforce contracts and on order that makes savings safe and provides better currency than cartridges, Mexico's popular legal tender today. Credits are only possible when contracts are enforced. Men will work with industry only where wages and property are protected. See how Mr. Barren describes the fashion in which the brief and uncertain economic protection of an American plant has turned the peon into a steady oil-producer, self-directed, in a great and complex plant.

If there are no courts that men can trust, there can be no credits or contracts. If these are not, neither capital nor wages come. Once, in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, even for a third of the nineteenth century, before steam on sea and land swept space aside, it was possible in isolation for some industrial community to gather strength, as in islanded England or in early organized France, and this development gave strength and power to the English King's Bench writ and to the French King's "Parlement."

Apart, China had, a century ago, a sound