very deeply in favour of democratic social legislation. Why do not the Liberals come over and help us? They can do more to help the lame dog over that difficult legislative stile in that way than they can by sulking away as an insignificant wing of the Opposition. They may shed a few individuals to the Socialists in the process, but what does that matter? Those supporters are more hindrance than help to their party in any case.

I am sure we are at the parting of the ways in the Liberal ranks. As one who has many Liberal friends in the country, I am sure I am expressing the view of the vast majority. If they help the present Government in its difficult task, Liberalism will survive. The Liberal Party will in any event have done much to save the country from a great peril. It will not only have destroyed its greatest enemy, but it will have rid the State of the most dangerous menace in its history. The Conservative Party can defeat Socialism by itself. The last election has proved that. But it cannot secure its extinction from our national life as a serious political force. With the powerful aid of the Liberal Party we can secure that end, but it can only be secured by a united and loyal effort. The last thing the Conservative Party wants is the extinction of the Liberal Party. I, at any rate, want to see the Liberal Party survive, but I only want it to survive as a definite anti-Socialist organisation. The day has gone when there is any middle course between Socialism and anti-Socialism, if indeed it ever existed. The Liberalism of Mr. Gladstone would have shuddered at any thought of revolution. If the fires of Liberalism are to be rekindled, this object can only be attained by Liberals being definitely anti-Socialist in character and action. Only by these tactics can their party be saved, and by saving themselves they will also save their country and their Empire.

JOHN R. REMER.

MEXICO

OUR manifest interests in Mexico, political as well as commercial, notwithstanding, we continue to refuse recognition to her present Government. On November 5 last the Mexican Consul-General turned the key in the lock of his London offices, and took his departure from our shores. It was, he explained, not consonant with the dignity of his country to maintain a consular service here while she still awaited recognition at our hands.

We have accorded recognition to Bolshevist Russia. The signatures of British statesmen stand side by side on a provisional treaty with names more infamous than Europe has known for a century and a half, and the shadow of this dark association still clings and contaminates, although the people of this island, with a gesture of almost unparalleled unanimity, have conveyed their intense dissatisfaction with and abhorrence of a measure which seeks to link them with the welter of barbarism which is Soviet Russia. And yet, although we have extended acknowledgment to those who seek to undermine our Constitution by every artifice of conspiracy and secret propaganda and strive unceasingly to overthrow the altars of the Christian faith by the dissemination of blasphemies unspeakable, we still hesitate to recognise a Government and a people whose valiant endeavours in the paths of constitutional progress have been strangely misinterpreted as the Western reflection of the Soviet chaos.

The error-based on the most wretched misunderstanding of Mexican aspirations and ideals—must once and for all be exposed. Let it be placed on record here, and in a manner that admits of no dubiety, that the legitimate aspirations of the Mexican people are as far removed in spirit and purpose from the abominations of Bolshevism as it is possible for them to be. The movement in Mexico is confined entirely to Mexican soil, and seeks not at all to interfere with the polities or constitutions of other lands. Nor does it attempt to disturb the faith of the Mexican people. Indeed, any effort in either direction would speedily precipitate revolution among a population markedly averse from international complications and most notably devout.

If we look upon the pictures of Muscovy and Anahuac as they

hang east and west upon the world's political walls, we discern in this nothing but unrelieved gloom, while in that we find the darkness illuminated by gleams of progress and gracious selfsacrifice. Mexico is at present engaged in the arduous task of national reconstruction and in discharging her debts, while Moscow contrives to evade hers, or merely repudiate them, while seeking to poison the wells of the world's thought. Mexico is reshaping herself in a manner which merits applause rather than neglect. Her attitude to ourselves and to the rest of the world is as far removed from that of Soviet Russia as it is possible to conceive, and we are too prone to judge of it in the light of such isolated incidents as that of the assassination of Mrs. Evans.

The whole significance of Mexico's effort may, indeed, be summed up in one word: the welding of the several castes of which her population is made up into one people and the restoration to the native Indian of certain lands which he has regarded as peculiarly his own since before the period of the Conquest. Those responsible for this policy are desirous that it should be carried out in the most strictly constitutional manner without hardship to any class, and by free popular consent, rather than by those methods of terror and tyranny which mark the policy of the Soviet régime. Hand in hand with this policy is the effort of an able and gifted band of intellectual workers to bring to the Indian a larger measure of culture in the arts peculiar to him, and this alone nobly differentiates the Mexican aim from the retrograde activities of the Soviet Government, implied association with which Mexicans of all classes most strongly resent.

To the majority of Europeans it must seem as though Mexico were a land where the visits of the phoenix of revolution are fixed, not at far-separated cycles, but almost triennially. But in reality for a century past there has been but one revolution in Mexico. We cannot quarrel with the statement, for the Mexicans themselves assure us that the revolution has been going on for the last 115 years, indeed since Hidalgo raised the standard of revolt in 1810, and that he and Morelos, Lerdo, Diaz, Madero, Villa, Huerta, Carranza, and now Obregon and Calles, are all actors in one great incident, the figures of one vast canvas. Nay, Mexican publicists go farther, for they make it reasonably plain to us that what they call the revolution of a century' is in reality but the last act in the mighty drama which began with the conquest of Mexico by Cortez.

We, who are perhaps too prone to regard our history as a series of reigns starred at recurring intervals by the greater political innovations, may feel somewhat dubious of the Mexicans' ability to visualise their own national drama so completely. Yet,

if the term may be employed, the history of few countries is so 'consistent' as that of Mexico, and one who has examined it carefully cannot but concur with its native chroniclers, for, since Cortez laid the first stone of the great cathedral of Mexico on the foundations of the shambles which had been the temple of Uitzilopochtli, there has been but one actual political ideal for the Mexican Indian: the resumption of his ancient independence and the reconquest of the soil of his fathers. Unless this is understood, then the whole of Mexican history is misunderstood. For this end the Mexican Indian has for generations maintained such secret societies as that of the Nagualists, who by the performance of strange rites sought at once to keep alive the remains of their bizarre religion and regain the sovereignty of their country. But now, discarding supernatural aid, he opposes a purely political resistance to gachupin, or white ascendency. Led by white Liberal or Radical intellectuals inspired by the story of his great Aztec past, who feel it no disgrace to support the ambitions of a people who formerly could boast of a not undistinguished civilisation of their own, he clamours for the restoration of his sequestrated communal lands and for the recognition of his right to develop his native culture and ideals in his own way.

With these ideals is bound up an ambition for social reform and a higher standard of material well-being which cannot be described as partaking either of Socialistic or Communistic tendencies, and which is indubitably stimulated by his white intellectual leaders. It had its origin in the propaganda of Labourist organisations which are by no means so extremist as those of Europe, and which are susceptible to control on the part of the advanced groups of Spanish origin. Such a picture of present-day Mexican politics may not commend itself to those who have read of the exploits of Mexico's bandit chiefs and of the frightfulness which appears to be inseparable from a Mexican revolt. But brigandage in Mexico had as its direct cause latifundia, or absentee landlordism, and the alienation of the native communal lands. It was, generally speaking, the work of social derelicts rendered desperate by gross ill-treatment or prolonged unemployment on the land, and it has at last been suppressed, not by the land-owning class, but by that intellectual caste which seems to be in a fair way to lead both lawless and lawabiding into the paths of decent citizenship.

It seems scarcely necessary to recapitulate the phases through which the Mexican revolution has passed since the fall of the Diaz régime. Diaz, it is now known, delivered the country lock, stock and barrel to foreign speculators at the bidding of the Cientificos, or financial coterie. Madero and his Liberals revolted against this reactionary policy, but lost grip, and Mexico became

the prey of bandits' like Villa and the Zapatas, who, half revolutionaries, half robbers, gave the Indian population to believe that only by looting the large centres of commercial activity and the haciendas of the landowners and by wiping out the whites could they hope to reconstruct Mexico on Indian lines. The régime of Carranza seemed at first to hold the elements of tranquillity. But he attempted to revive the Tsarist policy of Diaz, with results speedily fatal to himself. It was only when his corrupt rule was ended by Obregon's assumption of the provisional presidency that the beginnings of stable government emerged out of ten years' chaos.

It has by no means been generally recognised that with the election of Alvaro Obregon the revolution entered upon a phase so entirely novel to Mexican politics that its actual significance was for a time almost lost sight of even by the Mexicans themselves. It was, indeed, the beginning of a new epoch in Mexican social and national development. The ideals of Madero and those who immediately succeeded him were primarily political in character, while those of Obregon were entirely racial and social. He revealed himself almost at once as a social realist. But his native common-sense and profound insight into the needs of his country, while showing him the pressing need for widespread social reform, saved him from the extravagances and idealistic fatuities of Bolshevism. He saw that Mexican society consisted of a comparatively small oligarchy of landowners of Spanish origin, who may, for the purposes of general comparison, be likened to the aristocracy of Tsarist Russia, and a vast democracy of Indian and semi-Indian race, who may loosely be compared with the Russian moujiks. Between the interests of the two classes he hesitated not at all. The peon was Mexican, the Spaniard an exotic importation. The larger and native element called loudly and righteously for manumission from the shocking conditions of peonage to which the Spanish aristocracy had subjected it for four centuries. With steady hand Obregon began the task of gradually loosening the fetters of generations. Exercising the utmost caution, he preferred to untie the Gordian knots rather than sever them with the sword. Indeed, in some respects he has displayed almost reactionary tendencies. At first he administered the boon of popular control in small doses. He carefully fostered social groups such as the Mexican Federation of Labour, the National Agrarian Party and the Yucatan League of Resistance, and all such movements as arose out of popular and racial idealism rather than out of the energies of self-seeking politicians. But he exercised a strict censorship over these bodies, strongly discouraging fanatical tendencies and inculcating a wise moderation in the development of a sense of social right.