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xxiv its faiths. At bottom, men are alike. Human beings make Humanity. Under like conditions, all act alike. Give any land and any race a fair chance and it will be as others and not otherwise.

But after old systems, industrial and economic, are undermined and overthrown, this chance can only come by building anew under protected conditions. See how English courts are bringing India closer and closer to self-government. Where would Cuba be but for our aid? Give Mexico protection for order, courts, contracts, industries, and sanitation for a brief space, — one, two, or three decades, and what is this span in the life of a nation? — and the splendid qualities of the Mexican people would do the rest. Keep order, create courts, educate a generation, turn out typhus and tropical diseases which scourge the Mexican home (some of the worst maladies are not tropical), and the courage, the loyalty, the patient industry, the quick teachableness of the Mexican can be trusted to maintain what it secures under tutelage, and to add to it.

Mexico is to-day like the great oil wells of which Mr. Barron gives so vivid a picture, a fathomless resource for the light and power of the world, and needing only the mechanism which will enable it to set a thousand keels and ten