MEXICO AND ITS
RECONSTRUCTION
CHAPTER I
WHY MEXICO IS A PROBLEM
A generation ago few Americans recognized that Mexico was a problem and still fewer that it was one that deeply concerned the United States. For more than a half century it had been a country in which civil dissension was seldom absent. It was a land almost unknown, one in which the stagnation of the Spanish colonial system of government had been succeeded by the stagnation which comes from lack of enterprise, lack of education, and lack of intelligent and efficient government. The dictatorship which had been set up recently had shown signs of strength, it is true, greater than its short-lived predecessors, and railway building had made a promising beginning but the outside world still looked upon Mexico as a problem to itself and a matter of comparative indifference to others.
But the past generation has seen an internationalizing of the affairs of the world that has made it impossible for any state to remain isolated from the affairs of its neighbors. Strictly speaking, of course, national interests are not bounded by national frontiers and they
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