Page:Mexico under Carranza.djvu/160

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144
MEXICO UNDER CARRANZA

own country, is the difference between the policies which direct the government of the two countries shown.

The largest privately owned tract of land in the United States is the great Maxwell Ranch, in New Mexico. This tract, consisting of about 1,470,000 acres, has for years belonged to Dutch capitalists and is devoted principally to stock grazing. But nobody has heard any accusations that these foreign investors have inflicted a grievous wrong upon our people by becoming owners of this great holding. Probably every citizen of New Mexico would resent indignantly any suggestion that he desired to see his state, or its citizens, become the possessors of this land by confiscation. The industrious Scandinavian peoples, who settled the great Northwest, and made their homes upon land acquired for a very small part of its actual value from the Government, and who are to-day the most responsible factors in the prosperity of states like Minnesota and Wisconsin, rendered the same service to this country that the industrious Americans who settled in a number of agricultural colonies and made their homes and developed lands there rendered to Mexico.

I have in mind an Italian colony established some years ago upon cheap land in a sparsely settled section of my native state, Arkansas. These industrious Italians, on land that before had pro-