Introduction to Mexico By Anna Dill Gamble Rev. R. A. McGowan and The Latin America Committee PRICE 10 CENTS T H E C A T H O L I C A S S O C I A T I O N F O R I N T E R N A T I O N A L P E A C E 1312 Massachusetts Avenue N.W. Washington, D. C. 1936 ^ P P R E C I A T I O N for their cooperation in sponsoring this report is hereby expressed to Fordham University, New York City, in their response to the Holy Father's appeal, "May they all unite in the peace of Christ in a full concord of thoughts and emotions, of desires and prayers, of deeds and words—the spoken word, the written word, the printed word — and then an atmosphere of genuine f peace, warming and beneficent, will envelop all f the world." * * I ''HIS is a report from the Latin America Com- * mittee of the Catholic Association for Inter- national Peace and is being issued as a study from this Committee. It was presented and discussed at the regular annual meeting of the organization. The Committee cooperated in the final form of the report. It was presented to the Executive Commit- tee which ordered it published. As the process in- dicates, this report, being the report of only one Committee, is not a statement from the whole Association. L A T I N AMERICA C O M M I T T E E REV. W I L L I A M F . BLAKESLEE, C . S . P . J O H N J . M E N G Chairman, ANNA DILL GAMBLE J O H N W . B U R K E CAJULOS E . CÁSTAÑEDA M R S . PETER L . COLLINS J . D E SIQUEIRA COUTXNHO REV. A . CREIGHTON HENRY GRATTAN DOYLE REV. MOTHER JOSEPHINE ELIZABETH W . LOUGHRAN MARIE R . MADDEN REV. J A M E S A . MAGNER REV. VINCENT MARINARO REV. R . A . M C G O W A N ROSE J . M C H U G H E . FRANCIS M C D E V I T T MERCEDES MOLINA Y ANCHORENA W I L L I A M F . MONTAVON MARY S . M U R P H Y REV. W . COLEMAN NEVILS, S . J . ANNE M . NICHOLSON M A Y G . O ' D O N N E L L REV. EDWARD PETERS, C . S . P . M O S T REV. RICHARD PITTTNI, S . C . W I L L I A M A . PRENDERGAST REV. E D W I N RYAN W I L L I A M FRANKLIN SANDS J O H N SCHULER ELIZABETH B . SWEENEY SISTER MARY VINCENT REV. J O H N E . WILLIAMS, C . S . V . T A B L E O F C O N T E N T S PAGE I — T H E PRESUPPOSITIONS 3 I I — A CATHOLIC INDIAN CIVILIZATION 5 H I — A N ECONOMIC DEMOCRACY 6 IV—MISREPRESENTATIONS G V — T H E DECLINE 1 0 V I — M E X I C A N LIFE IN ITS ARCHITECTURE 12 V I I — T H E N E W INDIVIDUALISM 13 VIII—INDIVIDUALISM VERSUS THE CHURCH I S IX—INDIVIDUALISM IN MEXICO 17 X — C A N A FAIR HISTORY OF MEXICO BE WRITTEN?.. . . 19 XI—CATHOLIC SOCIAL PROGRAMS 2 3 X I I — " T H E REVOLUTION." LAND DISTRIBUTION 2 6 X I I I — T H E LABOR MOVEMENT. FOREIGN OWNERSHIP... . 2 9 X I V — T H E CHURCH AND SOCIAL CHANGES 3 1 X V — T H E PERSECUTION 3 3 XVI—ILLITERACY. INDIANISM 3 6 X V I I — T H E FUTURE '• 3G X V I I I — A M E R I C A N POLITICAL INFLUENCE 3 9 X I X — T H E EFFECTS 4 1 X X — O U R INFLUENCE—GOOD AND BAD 4 2 X X I — T H E PRESENT 4 4 A N I N T R O D U C T I O N T O M E X I C O ^ / r ^ j |u Spaolal 31 L Collections ̂ J THE PRESUPPOSITIONS MEXICO is so lovely and lovable and tragic that the search for the unifying reasons of both its great attractiveness and black tragedy goes endlessly on. Those who attack the riddle carry along their own presuppositions. That there be no mistaking, let the chief ones revealed here be stated at once. There is the moral judgment against conquest, empire and imposition from without. This must be defined, or it can be distorted into a view that leaves the conqueror no duties. Con- quest, unprovoked, is wrong, and in part is self-defeating. But conquest, having become a fact, the situation which the con- queror has in part or wholly created places on him responsibil- ities. Spanish rule in Mexico was far from an ideal reparation for conquest; but in part it was such, and in total effect vastly improved 'the condition of the Indians. There is, second, the presumption in favor of the spread of Catholic civilization—not only the Catholic Faith and the Catholic worship of God, but Catholic family life, Catholic social-economic life, Catholic arts, Catholic political life. Vari- ety from place to place and period to period is implied, and failures and opposition are assumed as inevitable. Of these elements, Faith, worship, the family and social-economic rela- tionships are the more fundamental. Upon our understanding of these presuppositions and our best available knowledge of the facts depends our ability to know Mexico. They are Mexico's own terms. Mexico suf- fered an unjust and a cruel conquest. Given this bad start, the people in Mexico began immediately and have continued to wrestle ever since with the problem of how and in what forms to become a Catholic civilization—or how not to become one. It was Spain that conquered Mexico. Yet the very con- quest presented to the Catholic theologians of Spain herself the problems of the morality of conquest and the obligations to the conquered. The principles here are in the main the answer of these fathers of international law, derived from the help the Faith gives to know the laws of human relations. The cruelty during the conquest, real however exaggerated, 3 4 An Introduction to Mexico was but an incident in this larger injustice. Cruelty was, how- ever, a sin of the time. When we condemn Spain for it we con- demn her in her own ideal, an ideal then as now, broken by all who had not then, or now, reached the point of actually practicing the Faith of Christ. With Mexico there were also marked differences. The cruelty was the cruelty of individual adventurers often acting, as Cortez acted, without even gov- ernmental warrant for conquest; and Spain to a degree sought as soon as it learned of the cruelty (indeed even Cortez sought) to prevent further cruelty. Cruelty was a sin to be repented and prevented. While Spain imposed certain of her institutions upon the conquered, the Catholic Faith was not imposed by force It was accepted by the Indians through the words and lives of saintly men, their friends and protectors against the oppres- sion of the conquistadores. Accepting the Faith involved also, in very consequence, an end to the human sacrifices in the old Aztec religion, an end to cannibalism, and the begin- f ^ S o f t t 1 h e c e n d o f slavery. Even had the people not accepted ttte Faith, Spam was obliged to root out these crimes, once it had taken over political power. There is perverseness in criti- cizing Spam for having interfered with these institutions. To her glory she did. It is clear, however, that Spain did not regard all Indian customs bad. There was the great wisdom of the missionaries m transforming for example, the old dances to the pagan gods into dances to Christ and His saints. We in the United States think more of the evil done by the conquistador es than of the good the Church and the Spanish government accomplished. When we are not blaming the Span- iards for imposing their religion and moral standards upon the Indians we are finding fault with them for failing to make model Christians of all the Indian tribes. As their long-range plans for building a Catholic Indian civilization Show, the Spanish did not expect it, and we should not have expected it There was, m fact, too much optimism in expecting the Faith to transport the Indians speedily and completely to the s ate of development reached by peoples who had been Cath- olics for centuries. Mass conversions to the Catholic Faith 0 J a VES* o f conviction do not mean creation of a Catholic national life. That is a slow process. It is one 5 An Introduction to Mexico thing to save individual souls, another thing to form a Cath- olic habit of life, and still another to create a Catholic civi- lization. Witness the early Middle Ages. Witness ourselves. Moreover, we cannot but quarrel with the Europe of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Instead of unit- ing all resources upon extending the best of itself to the coun- tries of the new discoveries, Europe split, became nationalistic, part of it flirted with classical paganism, part of it went Prot- estant and all of it in varying degrees started on the road to the present world debacle. If any country was to undertake the task in the New World alone, Spain was surely best equipped and the most courageous. Still the responsibility was too much for a single country. I I A CATHOLIC INDIAN CIVILIZATION All that seems clear. Immediately confusion begins. Some refuse to see that Spain tried actually to create a Catholic Indian civilization. Some see only the failures so as to con- demn them. Some, if they realized its nature, would reject the central effort. Some glorify even the failures. Some come to the problem with a Protestant mind, or a national bias, or a pre-War and pre-depression delusion that only nineteenth cen- tury ideals are good, or with a romantic cult of the primitive. One tendency glorifies the qualities and accomplishments of 'the Indians before the conquest so as to condemn nearly everything that has happened since. Yet which Indians? They were of many different levels. They ranged from sav- agery to cruel although somewhat advanced forms of barbarism and on over the hill to decadent sons of dead cultures living among monuments which their ancestors or, perhaps, other tribes had built. They were of many different characters, ranging from mild and friendly tribes to cruel and bloody. We may well oppose the way the Indians were brought into contact with Europe. Yet Europe was good for them. The more common blunder is in not understanding what was tried. Spain, representing Catholic Europe, tried to do what to the modern mind is the unbelievable. There was con- flict and much 'haziness; but it seems to be true that she tried in the first fervor to establish, under a temporary overlordship 6 An Introduction to Mexico of Spaniards, a Catholic Indian civilization in Mexico. Un- less this is known, Mexico is not known. Without this knowl- edge compromises and failures appear as crimes and no ex- planation exists for an eighty-five per cent Indian Mexico today. Everyone will admit that vast numbers of Indians received the Faith, adopted the monogamous family and, wanderers before, came together under their own chiefs in settled villages and centers of civilization. Mexico, early, had schools of man- ual training, liberal colleges, schools of science and universities. It enjoyed richly endowed institutions of charity. The new worship became a familiar and beautiful part of Mexican life. Great poets, painters, architects and wood-carvers flourished. Saints were born. All this, against a background of recent savagery and barbarism, is amazing. For example, Professor E. G. Bourne of Yale University in his Spain in America., says that sixteenth century Mexico had institutions of learning "that in number, range of studies, and standard of attainments by the officers surpassed anything existing in English America until the nineteenth century." I l l AN ECONOMIC DEMOCRACY Yet more than these, Spain undertook at the beginning to establish a just social-economic system. This is what many present-day Mexicans forget and most Americans do not sus- pect. It is not merely that the policy was not the customary imperialist policy of slaughter, slavery or isolation on reserva- tions. The very encomiendas, which gained later so evil a name were in the beginning what the name implies—a trusteeship and indeed a temporary one-generation trusteeship. Spaniards were made trustees of vast tracts of lands. On these lands lived Indians. Spaniards were trustees of the process of Indian civilization. Standards of the trusteeship were laid down in the law and the effort was made to enforce the standards. In a generation the Spaniards entrusted with this power were to withdraw from the lands. The Indians in a generation were to become the social rulers of a new and Catholic civilization of their own. 7 An Introduction to Mexico The well-known social system of the California missions illustrates a second method, repeated over and over again in Mexico among the more savage tribes. A third method was the communal village lands, the ejidos, from which the villagers could obtain many of the needs of their life. The general rule was for villages, whether in the trustee areas or not, to have their own lands. A fourth method, little heard of and yet, usually in less developed form, common in even the trustee territory, was the establishment of a community and associated life. In these four methods (and their origin) is found the secret of that so-called "primitive" life of the villages. Many Ameri- cans are attracted by it, who, however, do not know that they are looking at a carefully nurtured Christian culture, still in part surviving after industrialism and nineteenth century capi- talism and persecution, and still carrying over the Faith and the pre-capitalistic ideas and organizations of Europe. A lofty example of the great effort is the little-known work of Don Vasco de Quiroga. He came out from Toledo in the early sixteenth century with the second Mexican government. After an admirable year in Mexico City, he was sent to the Tarascan territory of the present Michoacan. He did there all the things that are usually ascribed to Spain's colonial prac- tice. He established churches, schools, and hospitals. He en- forced permanent and monogamous marriages. The Indians were gathered in villages and towns. The villages, as was gen- eral, had lands and limited powers of self-government. Don Vasco did more. His was a lake-country and the lake furnished a highway from village to village that permitted a unity over a large area. Each village around the lake was given a trade. One was the textile town, one the shoe town, one the fisherman's town, one the pottery town and so on. All marketed in a central marketing town. The town of a speciality could alone sell textiles or pottery or shoes; the people were assured a living from their work. So that prices might be fair for all, the prices were regulated. They had self-government. A guild organization and guild practices thus lived in a whole countryside in the heart of sixteenth century Mexico. The best plan of economic relations that the world had developed be- came the form of social-economic life in Don Vasco's territory, adapted to different conditions. In the isolation of villages else- 8 An Introduction to Mexico where, it took a different form but the same principle of a com- munity organized in guilds and of economic morality existed commonly, in full or in part, throughout. A volume on the Mexico City guilds of the colonial period was, for example, published a few years ago by the present revolutionary govern- ment. Yet this type of associative life has gone relatively un- noticed. There is a question again of prejudgments. Some approach Mexico from the nineteenth century standpoint of unquestion- ing allegiance to morally and socially unregulated and unor- ganized production and trade; some from the Marxist view- point; some with thought only of finding crimes and abuses; some with a disregard for the importance of a social system; some with a belief that the machine started our woes and that pre-machine artisans automatically established a good social system, even if landlordism might have, unaccountably, afflicted their peasant brothers; some from an idealization of the primi- tive. This whole matter requires careful study. To understand the earliest stage of colonial Mexico we have somehow to stand inside the ideal and see what was attempted. The fashion has long been against recognizing it as an ideal worth while or even of noticing it at all. IV MISREPRESENTATIONS A history of Mexico written to uphold an anti-Catholic or atheist thesis does not make sense. The reader is bored by its unintelligibility, much as he is bored by the interminable wars, revolutions, and dynasties of Chinese history, and for the same reason: the Western mind is unable to grasp the real purposes, the ideals, and the philosophies that moved leaders and peoples in their endless struggles. Mexican history, written without the clue of religion, has made nonsense. Until we get a history of Mexico, not steeped in Anglo-Saxon prepossessions, or uphold- ing the thesis of a group of modern políticos, or one written merely as a defense of Spain, both Catholics and Protestants in the United States will continue to flounder in a morass of mis- understanding about our sister nation to the south. Seldom, for instance, does one find in United States litera- 9 An Introduction to Mexico ture about Mexico any mention of the encomienda system, ex- cept to hear it denounced. It is known to United States readers only in its decay; and this decay is assumed to be its normal state. Nevertheless scholarly researches in regard to this sys- tem have already been begun by some of our universities, and this important social and economic experiment need not con- tinue to be misrepresented to United States readers. What Americans of today, both Catholic and Protestant, and even most Mexicans fail to grasp is how carefully and reasonably and in detail the welfare of the Indians was debated, according to Catholic principles, both in Spain and in Mexico at the time the encomienda system was established. Modern ignorance of Catholic political and social theories of government, together with modern disapproval of theologi- cal principles and their implications on social life, has much to do with our misunderstanding the methods by which Spain tried to solve her colonial problems. It has been much easier to misunderstand. It has satisfied our national and racial pride to denounce the whole system as a "vicious system of united Church and State" and then dismiss it promptly from our minds. That the first great effort was intended, and would have pro- duced a great civilization had it been continued without com- promise, is one of those historical facts that too long has been covered by the debris of individualistic, anti-Spanish and anti- Catholic controversy. Even where the encomienda system is understood and ap- preciated, it is too often the custom to ascribe all the credit to Spain as though she had only some natural gift for dealing with varied racial elements. Casual and sentimental references to "the Fray Las Casas whose statue stands . . . lifting his saintly visage, etc.," or glorification of the marvelous proficiency of the Mexicans in their village handicrafts as a purely Indian heritage, simply will not do. Neither will it do to put Las Casas in a footnote as a mere authority on Spanish "atrocities." It is necessary to explain why Las Casas became the champion teller of atrocity stories of all time, and yet received such strong support both from the Church and from the Spanish government. Nothing could more completely refute the popular American belief in the tyranny of Spain in Mexico than the fact that Las Casas was not only tolerated but encouraged in his campaign on behalf of the In- 10 An Introduction to Mexico dian. The result of his uninterrupted activities and propaganda is as much a part of the picture as the gruesome stories them- selves. It is also a part of the picture that he supplied the enemies of Spain, both religious and commercial, with a bagful of stones to be cast at her; and for this Spain finds it hard to forgive him. The part of colonial history without which the rest is non- sense is that the atrocity stories about the conquistadores had at least this effect on Catholic Spain: her government, without the least hesitation or delay, passed the justly famous "New Laws of the Indies," the wisest, the most humane laws for the protection of subject peoples ever conceived by any rulers past or present. Let us therefore not be shocked about Spanish cruelties in Mexico 400 years ago and utterly forget that contemporary Catholic Spain was even more shocked, so shocked in fact as to do something about it. We of the United States might remember Cromwell's treat" ment of conquered Celts, his methods of confiscation and colonization, and his redistribution of the estates of Catholics among his soldiers by means of which two-thirds of Ireland was transferred to new proprietors. V THE DECLINE But there was a decline in the great early plan and the zeal. An external sign of the decline was that the one-genera- tion trusteeships of vast tracts of land were after great dispute and threats extended in the middle of the sixteenth century to two generations. Later, trusteeship became the equivalent of ownership. A white aristocracy was thus established to rule over a subject Indian population. The stamp of inferiority and inferior opportunities was put on an underlying population of a different race and color. The paraphenalia of an aristo- cratic society appeared. One class had ease and culture and the means of a good life. The results, of a stinted life for a majority and of permanent class domination appeared through- out all society, among both oppressed and oppressors, in family life, the arts, social life generally, even in the understanding of the Faith. 11 An Introduction to Mexico Old Spain had begun to go down hill. The old fire was flickering. Europe, that had once been Christendom, became the sad Europe of the absolute monarchies, of the Protestant cleavage, of the European wars, of a dying grandeur in Catholic countries in spite of much reform, and of a virile Protestantism and a rising rationalism, each distilling the poisons of national- ism in government and individualism in economic life. Spain herself became absolutistic in government and crossed the Pyrenees to enter the European storm. While continuing to spread Christian civilization northward in the missions that are so widely famous, Spain nevertheless postponed indefinitely her realization in the older parts of New Spain. A small, native- born aristocracy of Spanish descent was now established in an Indian country. Tp rule this aristocracy for the benefit of the people as a whole, Spain's vigor needed to be greater. That vigor decreased. Bishops and priests in Spain and in Mexico had written the first policy in the spirit of Catholicism against opposition from the conquerors. But as time passed, the weight of the Europe of that period, of a declining Spain and a Mexican aristocracy hung about even their necks. The bad was accepted. Indian inferiority was assumed. Minimum requirements, and even less, became the regretted rule. Sentimental and pietistic souls worshiped in florid churches. Charity institutions bloomed in the midst of a defiance of justice and social justice. Breaking the rigors that attended the rule of the landed aristocracy of a still • primitive people of another race, much even of the original intention or spirit was realized. There were the village-lands, the small owner and the organized artisans in city, town and village; the patriarchal life on the estates; the sense of obligation to others in economic life; the works of charity; churches that seem to have grown out of the very soil; the Mass and the sacraments; the round of the liturgical year, the family feast days, the special holy days of the villages and towns; pilgrimages; the beauty of community veneration in pageant and folk-dance of the patron saint of their com- munity; community worship during Holy Week of the crucified and risen Christ; and a sense of human unity and equality in the Church and before God. The later colony was not so bad as painted. The near an- cestors of the Indians had been pagan barbarians. Their de- 12 An Introduction to Mexico scendants were to be outraged by a business and rationalist era. Yet so rooted was the Catholic culture of the Indians that even now, American travelers to the villages marvel at the merging of religion, family life, work and recreation into a satisfying and beautiful unity of life in contrast with our own broken and meager culture. These Indians still know that life is not a block of separate compartments. The industrial revolution has not yet reached them and while nineteenth century Individualism has harmed them grievously they have not accepted it as a re- ligion of life. They still live in the older culture. But it is not Indian culture. It is Catholic culture among Indians. The determin- ing element is not the primitive material surroundings. The determining element is their outlook upon these surroundings and themselves. Their outlook is their Faith and moral code for this life and the next. American travelers do, indeed, ex- aggerate; these villages are not little Utopias; but they possess inescapable beauty and attractiveness. A like character of soul can be seen even in Mexico City. It lays its mark upon Mexi- cans everywhere, even among those most oppressed or degraded, even among those who deny and bitterly persecute the Faith. VI MEXICAN LIFE IN ITS ARCHITECTURE Mexican colonial architecture is an example in point. As the Church with the craftsmanship of the guildsmen produced in Catholic societies the marvel of Gothic architecture, so in the handicraft economy of old Mexico, she created, with a fusion, however imperfect, of Spanish and Indian cultures within a Catholic view of life, the only original types of architecture since the medieval period. No one will deny (whatever his particular theories of art) that much Mexican architecture is extraordinarily beautiful and, for the same reason, that the Gothic of the Middle Ages is beautiful. It is an expression of the life and aspirations of the people. It was meant to appeal to them and not to the critics. Therefore it is creative and not a mere imitation of the art of other peoples. The architecture of Mexico tells the story of a real collaboration between architect and workman. "In New Spain," says Walter H. Kilham in his Mexican Archi- 13 An Introduction to Mexico tecture of the Vice-Regal Period, "architectural design swung away (from European models) along a path influenced by na- tive ideas as well as Spanish fashions, through a dazzling climax of half-Indian, half-Spanish extravaganza, finally to reach a goal (as eighteenth century European formalities of style)— the elegant and formal Academismo, which completed the most remarkable excursion in architeptural design known to the his- tory of the Renaissance." "There is naturally no Gothic in Mexico," he continues, "but in the Renaissance way, the country's splendid churches, sweetly domed and towered . . . are products of a really great architecture, well-conceived, thoroughly understood, and mar- velously executed." VII THE NEW INDIVIDUALISM Mexico would have undoubtedly shaken off her partial ac- ceptance of evil had there been no great crisis immediately ahead. The irrepressible effects even of a shortened effort to live Catholic lives and create a Catholic civilization would have come to the surface. The Faith is a living thing. If forced within narrow boundaries, it sooner or later breaks the dams and floods the whole civilization of a people. Before the con- strained and narrowed Catholicity could, however, break the barriers, a crisis of huge proportions had come, and they were not prepared. The crisis had been approaching for some time but it broke at the opening of the nineteenth century. Sometimes the crisis is identified with Independence; and surely inexperience in the art of government, a reluctance of some to separate from Spain and the long indecisiveness, including even a non-appointment of Bishops for many years as the controversy dragged on and the Church suffered, launched Mexican life under a separate government unhappily. Oftener the crisis is identified with the rise to power of those of partly Indian blood; and surely the clash of differing social inheritances marked the Mexican crisis in a special way. But the chief fact about the Mexican nine- teenth century was that Mexico moved in a world that was be- ing made over and Mexico tried to imitate the pattern of the countries that led the world change. 14 An Introduction to Mexico The industrial revolution had come; and Mexico, imitating the world and not living up to her own nature, tried, with all the implications in social system, governmental policy and religion, to go "rugged individualist." Mexico faced the central world crisis of the nineteenth century and tried to solve it in the wrong way and in a way not suited to herself, and in a way that the rest of the world tried and, as we now in a world tragedy know, tried wrongly and suicidally. So drab a thing as the reaching out for Mexican raw ma- terials and for the sale there of her machine-made goods set off the spark. This unheroic beginning should not be startling to Americans; we remember well a tax on tea. Here was merely the effort to buy and sell. But it had even more dynamite in it. For inside it and around it a whole new kind of life was coming to a country which was not only in its material surrounding still extremely simple but did not believe in the moral code, or lack of it, in the new system. It is true that Mexico had already mortally offended against her own ideals. But she had never rejected them. They were still at work, had done great good and would do more. But now, invaded by the modern world, Mexico was asked to reject the old ideals and believe in some- thing different. Confuse the issue that arose at the beginning of the nine- teenth century with universal literacy and material progress; with political independence or an effort to end the power of the landed aristocracy's privilege; or with the rise of the mestizo or with Republican government (all of which were a part of it or accompanied it)—'and it remains at heart the same. The underlying issue was whether the new means of work and life should be consciously directed to the common good and whether human beings should be self-organized and governmentally regulated to that end; or whether there was to be no organiza- tion or government action and each individual allowed, en- couraged and put in a position to do about as he wished in ac- cord with his own greed and pride. This latter answer was adopted. It was the answer of Individualism. Freemasonry, as it happened, became the chief agency of the wrong answer and has remained so ever since. This new scheme of things implied at the outset a rejection of any law of God and Church about right and wrong in this part of life. But if there was to be no right or wrong and no 17 An Introduction to Mexico sense of responsibilities to others in so grave a thing, so ever- expanding a thing and in something that takes up so much, of one's conscious life and involves so many human relationships as does the circle' of ownership, work and the obtaining of the material means not only of life, but of family welfare, leisure, education, culture, freedom and even, sound morality—then the whole scheme of life that the Catholic Church teaches is not only to be disobeyed but contradicted and defied. Objectively there is not only mortal sdn but heresy and the heresy extends far. VIII INDIVIDUALISM VERSUS THE CHURCH Mexico in accepting this individualist scheme was trying to deny her nature; For Mexicans were then and are now Cath- olics. To go individualist they had to change their souls. Their best tradition had been one of economic morality, organized responsibility and government action. Now they were trying to throw it off. It is true that the colonial dry-rot of the later colonial period had left them ill-equipped to think out the new machine era in terms of their own underlying principles. They were enticed; as well, by the expanding wealth of the in- dividualist nations, which were also the industrial countries, and by the promise of greatness obtained through universal and compulsory literacy in a naturalistic education. The new ideas wrenched them. They realized this. But more and more the new era turned against the whole past and sought to destroy thè greatest things in Mexican life. It was no accident that Juarez, the leader of the fifties, who began the break-up of the village-lands in order to force In- dians to become rugged individualists (which resulted in their becoming wage-hands and beggars), should have also begun the more intense phase of the persecution of the Church that has now continued, in fact or in threat, for three-quarters of a century. Nor was it an accident that Don Vasco's self-govern- ing village guilds and all the associative life should have lost legal protection at the hands of men who tried to strip the Church of all influence in the country. There was an undying feud between the Church and the new atomic, fluid and mo- rality-denying Individualism;..the village-lands and the guilds 16 An Introduction to Mexico were in the spirit of the Church, and Individualism contradicts that spirit. The feud was the deeper because the new Individualism was not creating a modern business country. Foreigners became the chief industrialists, bankers and traders. Aspirants to the wealth and power that Individualism promised turned their eyes then to ownership of land—not toward land distribution for the masses but toward their own rise to membership in the landed aristocracy. In the revolutions they often succeeded to the estates of the defeated. The proponents of the new era, forced to live in a rarefied atmosphere of theory, emphasized hostility to the Church be- yond those of other Catholic countries that similarly tried to put on an individualistic soul. Wanting to become landed aristocrats, they could arouse their anger still further against the Church. The Church possessed rich endowments in land to support education, charity, and worship. In that non-commer- cial period of Mexico, the Church funds served as practically the sole banker and the money was loaned at a low rate of in- terest. To us in a commercial age of much use of money, when churches, charities and schools can be supported by current taxes, voluntary contributions of money or fees, it is hard to realize the great need of endowments in another type of eco- nomic life. But endowments were the common rule of the time. The alternatives were barter and taxes. Neither was depend- able. If taxes alone had been relied on, the danger also of government domination would have been great. That the en- dowments of the Church were excessive for the purposes, is now commonly agreed. The endowments being great were all the more a target of the aspiring but defeated business individual- ists. Robbing the Church, as Spain had often shown, was easy; and the revolutionists, through ownership of stolen endowments, could and did rise to the position of the old landed aristocracy. Seventy-five years ago the last endowments were taken. Title to even buildings and grounds was taken. Many of the buildings were put to the same or even other uses in other hands. To speak of a wealthy church in Mexico as a fact of the past seventy-five years is wholly false. In this period of Individualism, the Indians became soon the despised people in their own country. Indian feast days were thought shameful. For villagers to practice their old arts 19 An Introduction to Mexico and try to keep the old associated life was held unprogressive. The customs of France, Great Britain and later the United States were imitated. IX INDIVIDUALISM IN MEXICO By those who wished to introduce the new Individualism the Church was accused of being opposed to progress. Therefore the Church, they said, must be destroyed. A virulent cam- paign was waged against religious education. Yet the Mexican government did not itself proceed with-'-a program of non- religious education in its own nineteenth century ideal. The reigning political groups, while accusing the Church of being unscientific and an obstacle to progress, sold out the industrial resources to foreigners. They spent their public life attacking the Church and upholding vagrant philosophies. Partly they were rationalizing the robbery of the Church. Then because they could not throw off their ingrained Catholic Faith or be simon-pure believers in pagan Individualism, they reared their families Catholics and themselves crept back into the Church on their deathbeds. When the secularist and individualist crisis broke at its greatest fury in the fifties (although it had been long brewing), Catholics had not removed the dry-rot of the later colonial period nor overcome the effects of an unguided Church during part of the long independence controversy. Now they found themselves besieged as well and legally, when not in fact, under the ban of persecution. To meet the crisis and fight the new Individualism, both in its denial of economic morality and brotherhood and in its opposition to the Church, they needed saintly heroism and far-sighted wisdom. The incessant ham- pering of the Church in her teaching powers by European gov- ernments had a specially devastating effect in Mexico and South America long before their independence from Spain. In the suppression of the Jesuits and their expulsion, not only were missions destroyed but many seminaries were closed. There was then and has been since a great shortage of priests. It was therefore not surprising that so many Mexicans, through lack of instruction and in the mixed and confused currents of the times, were unable to discern both wherein leaders of the 18 An Introduction to Mexico Church had been at fault and how much the new régime was a defiance of the Church's own social morality. In the colonial period Indian oppression came to be partially accepted. In the nineteenth century the new Individualism, if not accepted, ; was not, even when the oppression was greater, attacked either strongly enough to have effect or (in a scattered country of isolated villages and towns) strongly enough to be generally known. The Church was, falsely, given the reputation of even caus- ing the injustices of the old régime. The village-land system and the associative life of the villages, towns and cities had been the creation of the Church. In an amazing effort to build a civilization the Church had met defeat in part and had almost succumbed. But the new anti-Catholic individualists were themselves opposed even more to the democratic system of village-lands and guilds than to that aristocratic oppression wherein the social teaching of the Church had been overcome. They broke up the village-lands. They fought the associative life and deprived iit of government sanction and help. But they kept the aristocratic landed system and extended it and made it their own. They destroyed the good and kept the bad and even when active persecution lapsed they continued attacking the Church. Social injustice rolled higher and higher. Possessing little opportunity to sell their products and not crushing so much the Indians resident thereon, the old landed estates had been easy- going patriarchal baronies. Now in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries many estates became business firms. The pressure of profit-making told on the farm laborers and tenants who had lost, also, their own land-holdings in the dispersion of the village-lands. Industrial undertakings were under the same pressure. Foreign ownership, even when working conditions were better, made the oppression more hateful and drew, as well, the envy of those desiring business success: and their re- sentment at the domination of foreigners. Such, was the pres- sure of competitive business upon the Mexican complication. A revolution was on the way. 19 An Introduction to Mexico X CAN A FAIR HISTORY OF MEXICO BE WRITTEN? Partisan controversy against both the Catholic Church and Spain has completely obscured the underlying causes of Mexi- co's continued revolutionary activities. One fact cries loudly for explanation: Mexico has been free from Spain for more than a hundred years; for seventy-five years the Church in Mexico has been plundered of her wealth and subjected to the civil power ; yet the social and economic difficulties of Mexico are not solved. Mexico's troubles cannot indefinitely keep on being the fault either of Spain or of the Church, when both have been for So long eliminated from the political and economic life of the country. , , , , The people of the United States are at last facing the fact that any adequate interpretation of present-day Mexico must give us a clear explanation as to why her native rulers for more than three generations have failed much more completely than did her Spanish rulers in giving to the Indian masses economic security and sufficiency. Nothing can be more significant of our owri bankruptcy of thought than the acceptance by United States commentators on Mexican affairs of two such false issues as the quarrel with the Church and the efforts to recover a sup- posedly "lost" Indian civilization. We in the United States should not only divest our minds of our preconceptions against the Latin, but we should also learn to know the Indian better and not to be simply senti- mental about him. Sympathizers with Mexico in this country are far from doing justice to the Indian mentality—to its ideal- ism as well as to its power of thought, and to its moral and spiritual grasp of Christian principles. A well-known apologist for "Indianism" admits that the great Indian masses in Mexico are quite unaware of any cleavage between Indian and Mexi- can of Spanish descent! His explanation, however, is inade- quate. "In general," he says, "the Indian Who has remained Indian is inarticulate about it.: Politicians—usually mestizo— may boast 'soy puro Indio.'" But race-consciousness, he shows, is not a characteristic of the really "pure Indian" who apparently has not the slightest desire to revive a dead Indian civilization or to free himself from Spanish influence. What the pro-Aztec sentimentalist cannot grasp is that if the Indian 20 An Introduction to Mexico has so far resisted the race antagonism his government is bent on arousing in him, it is because he is so deeply and thoroughly Catholic. The Mexican government official understands this matter better than do his United States sympathizers; for hav- ing been for so long unable to "enter the mind" of the adult Indian, he is now, through teaching atheism in the schools, at- tempting to "enter the mind of the child." A pro-Aztec obsession has led the archeological amateur of today to hope, for some strange reason, to rediscover in the prehistoric past some solution for our modern ills. The archeological romanticist and the communist realist have united in their willingness to surrender everything, even the preserva- tion of the sick and the aged and the helpless, that has been achieved in Mexico through Christian social teaching. They admire (as well they may) the handicraft economy of the Mexican Indian. But lest the Church might gain some credit for this, they quite unhistorically ascribe the origin of the village handicraft system entirely to the Aztecs. Their knowl- edge of the medieval guild system is almost non-existent; and a prejudice against the Middle Ages, surviving from dead con- troversies, makes it the easier for them to ignore Spain's achievement in transferring to the Western hemisphere a system the destruction of which in Europe is acknowledged by econo- mists today to be one of the major disasters of post-Reforma- tion times and of today. The pro-Aztec propagandist is not content to claim for his cult of the primitive the Catholic handicraft and organized economy of the Indian. He asks us to divest our minds entirely of Christian preconceptions against pagan Indian morality, even to the point of condoning the bloody ritual of human sacrifices. In Mexico, a Study of the Two Americas, one writer of this pro-Aztec school, in a paragraph on "Heatlth and Hygiene," attempts even to show social uses of human sacrifice (which he elsewhere refers to as a fad, saying: "Like other fads, it might have passed.") because Aztecs "from anatomical studies of sac- rificial victims worked out a reasonably complete nomenclature for the human skeleton and muscular and nervous systems." He approves the "sensible, if harsh procedure of exposing those with probably incurable diseases, well supplied with food, to recover or die." We of the United States are so absorbed in our own fight 21 An Introduction to Mexico on "rugged Individualism" and the liberal philosophy which have filled our own country with millions of unemployed that we have forgotten what the effect must have been on Latin American countries. Above all, we fail to recognize the part played by Mexican revolutionary leaders of the last century, such as Juarez, in imposing upon Catholic Mexico the economic system of England, France, and the United States—a system based, as we know, on an individualistic philosophy of free competition, economic immorality, no organization, and gov- ernment inaction in the face of injustices. What could be more slip-shod or uncritical than to load on Porfirio Diaz the entire blame for Mexico's experiment with laissez jaire? It should not be forgotten that economlic liberalism had its origin in philosophic liberalism. The effect on Mexico as on other Latin American countries was profound. The so-called "enlightenment" advanced the idea that hu- man nature is inherently good. Jean Jacques Rousseau and the French Revolution popularized in Latin America the notion that mankind has been corrupted only by institutions, from which man must be freed in order to develop his powers to the full. Rousseauists substituted for conscience and the action of divine grace the natural emotions of man, denying the idea of evil and the necessity for moral effort. They believed that in order to remain spontaneously viirtuous, it is sufficient to remain in a state of nature. To the sentimental believer in the "goodness" of human nature, the Church, with her doctrines of original sin and man's need for salvation, is regarded as the greatest of all enslavers of mankind and the fundamental cause of all social ills. While Rousseauism has been today completely discredited in Europe and the United States through the dis- astrous results of unfettered human nature in the industrial field and in international life, yet the present rulers of Mexico con- tinue to profess thelir faith in a philosophy that teaches that to "free" mankind from religion and moral restraint is to insure him prosperity and a new start in life. That the present gov- ernment in Mexico does not really believe in the sentimental theory of the inherent goodness of human nature, goes without saying. For it is undoubtedly influenced, also, by the Hegelian- ism current in Russia and Germany which declares that the "State is the divine idea on earth" and should have supreme rights over the individual. This is, of course, nothing else than 22 An Introduction to Mexico a modern version of the Machiavellian idea of the divine right of kings. The liberalistic philosophy which prepared the way for the new tyranny (whether of capitalistic dictatorship within the shell of democracy or State absolutism) was heightened in Mexico by Benito Juarez. By dividing the land among the individual Indians, they were thought to have been given their "liberty." But left to a system of free competition without the protection of either organization or the State or the Church, the Indians destitute of experience or the means to develop their own land, sold it to foreign exploiters, for whom they henceforth were obliged to work as peons. This unequal competition be- tween the Indian and the foreign capitalist, in which the Indian played the tragic losing part, readied its culmination during the Diaz régime. During the revolutionary period that has followed; the land program (a program that to date has done more to enrich the leaders than to strengthen the peons) has been undertaken to undo, not to continue, the work of Juarez. The liberalistic solution of the land problem is entirely in the discard, but a morally irresponsible and atheist State absolutism has been substituted for a State regulation open to the criticism of the Christian conscience. The break-up of religious unity in Europe had both in Europe and the Americas gradually destroyed a clear concep- tion of the part religion should play in the social and economic life of mankind. Even Catholics, following their Protestant neighbors, little by little ceased to criticize in the light of Cath- olic teaching the institutions under which they were living. Ever since the so-called Reformation, Catholics had been told by the enemies of their Faith that the economic and social system under which they lived are outside the sphere of reli- gion; and gradually many Catholics began to believe this. While in Protestant countries the non-Catholic majority had openly and frankly revised their social ethics to fit the eco- nomic interests of the dominant class, Catholics in Catholic countries that stood under the rule of a Masonic minority of- fered less and less resistance, and finally learned to acquiesce in a system for which they felt no moral responsibility. In the revolt against the medieval system, Machiavelli's "Prince" had almost immediately emancipated the English and French governments from any considerations of moral restraint. 23 An Introduction to Mexico It was many a year, however, before Catholic Spain succumbed to the seductive idea that the King can do no wrong. It is not for nothing that we owe to Spain the development of inter- national law and the denial of the complete sovereignty of the State and of its claim to be the judge in its own cause. The secularist divorce between Christian morality and the economic and international life of peoples is one of the greatest calamities of modern times. The day has come when a fair history of Mexico may at last be presented to the people of the United States, because the liberalism, upon which our own economic system has been built and that has done so much to confuse and wreck Mexico, is now challenged on every side. But a fair history can never be written by men who either hate the Church or would, in the popular sense, apologize for her. It must be written by one who understands the meaning of her teachings upon the life of peoples and who has a clear understanding of the ideas and of the Faith, as well as of the economic motives that move both men and nations. XI CATHOLIC SOCIAL PROGRAMS The new series of revolutions broke in 1911. Shortly after the beginning of the century Catholic organizations, in. spite of the threat of persecution, had begun to form in order to oppose the reigning Individualism. The Mexican Catholic Congress was the first spearhead. Its first meeting in 1903 dealt with, among other matters, credit unions and the estab- lishment of labor associations that would develop into improv- ing the whole range of labor's life, economic, religious, moral and cultural, in both city and country. The following year and again in 19Q6 and in 1909, the Congress met and concerned itself more extensively with the economic problems of the Mexi- can dispossessed. Catholic Farm Congresses were held in various places. The 1904 Catholic Farm Congress recounted in session after session the misery into which the Indian laborers, on the land had fallen. The speakers painted in detail a black picture of widespread drunkenness, half-starving men and families, concubinage, child labor, illiteracy, peonage, unbelievably low wages, and misery, 24 An Introduction to Mexico moral, physical and economic. They called for reform all along the line. A speaker at the closing session besought a change not only in the name of justice and charity but to save Mexico from being bought piecemeal by American capitalists. "The laws of life do not halt," he said, "and the moment is here when if we do not pay the worker well, the foreigner will come here to pay him." Foreigners were even then increasing their ownership. But before the speaker's fears were fully realized, revolution had come. Catholic efforts working in a poisoned atmosphere had done some good but not enough. Living under the threat of persecution, and due to the lack of priests, the Mexican Church's voice had not been heard far. Still in a state of siege, it tended, as is always true of such times, to draw in upon itself and try to hold fast to the minimum of faith and morals. With the revolution there came much more activity and boldness. The Mexican "Social Week" of 1912 treated land distribution, a plan of inalienable family patrimony, and usury. This was before the Mexican revolution attained to the social program it later developed. The workingmen's associations had grown and formed their own federation. In January 1913, while Modero was still President, and four years before the new Mexican Consti- tution and its well-known articles on land and labor were adopted, their federation drew up a far-reaching program. Minimum living wages, fixed by a council within each industry, were asked. On the land question land distribution was asked for in order that the man on the land would have "the ownership and stable use of enough land for the fitting support of his family." They asked for regulation of the work of women and children and the prohibition of the work of married women and of children under twelve; for the system of inalienable family patrimony; for social insurance against unemployment, accidents, sickness and old age; for profit-sharing and the rise of the non-owning workers to the status of ownership; for anti- profiteering and anti-speculation laws; for middle class and sal- aried employees' organizations; for a regulation of "home- work," Sunday-rest laws, the legal right of unions to exist, tax laws based on ability to pay, etc. The program read as follows: 25 An Introduction to Mexico O U R C H I E F ECONOMIC DEMANDS 1. Preservation of the home and the life of the family, which requires as indispensable conditions: (a) Establishment of a minimum wage in each industry by a coun- cil of the industry which will meet the needs of an adult worker in normal conditions of life. (b) Regulation of the labor of women and children, leading to the suppression of wage labor by mothers and the prohibition of child labor under twelve years of age, with special guarantees for the health, morality and security of the work of young women. (c) The acquisition of a family property, inalienable and indivisible, consisting not only in small rural property but also in the city home and shop of the artisan. 2. Institutions for social insurance against unemployment, accidents, sick- ness, and poverty in old age. 3. Permanent councils of compulsory arbitration to peacefully settle con- flicts between capital and labor. 4. The right to share as far as feasible in the profits and even in the ownership of companies, to be obtained particularly by stock owner- ship or other methods of simple application. 5. Protection against profiteering and speculation, open or secret, which through various methods concentrates national wealth in the hands of the few by taking advantage of inexperience or of others' needs. 6. Facilities for the organization and protection of the middle class by means of free organizations of private salaried employees and em- ployees of the State, of small artisans, small merchants, etc. 7. Effective safeguarding of home-work, above all that of women and persons in the needle trades, founding for that purpose organizations for defense and assistance as necessary. 8. Representation before the government of the interests of the workers by means of representatives of their organizations. 9. As to the agrarian question, we propose a special program in which, taking into consideration the respect due the legitimate rights of own- ers, we present a whole system of reforms directed toward assuring as'far as possible to every capable farm worker the ownership and the stable use of enough land for the decent support of his family. In this program, we give capital importance to those institutions which at the same time that they favor the economic position of the farm worker, train him in his duties, educate him, improve his morality and protect him against his own faults and mistakes which render unproductive and ineffective his economic improvement. Our reforms proceed in a normal manner, step by step, without great transitions and without advances attempted before the people are ready for them; steadily, however, sustained and constant, we shall march toward the goal set before us. 26 An Introduction to Mexico Additional Observations It has not been our intention to outline all of the demands that we desire to make for our people, but only those that are the most urgent. Some among the demands are matters of strict justice, others merely of equity, of usefulness and opportuneness, but not for that reason less desirable, since human progress ought to be realized by obtaining a pro- portional advance for all social classes. This is demanded by the order of nature itself, by the harmony of Divine Providence and by the will of God. We make these demands with all the firmness of those who ground themselves in principle; in proclaiming them, we shall never use wrongful means, convinced as we are that in social changes moral fqrce is the only one that sooner or later conquers all difficulties. We ask of the Public Authorities: In general, that they give due con- sideration to the demands stated above. And in particular: 1. That they recognize the legal personality of economic organizations, recognizing their right of holding property to the extent necessary, right of jurisdiction within an industry over their members and right of representation before the public authorities. 2. That they recognize the right of employers' associations, labor unions and economic councils to establish wages and salaries equitable in themselves and socially advantageous. 3. That they pass and enforce a law on Sunday rest, j 4. That they change the Civil Code in the manner necessary to change small rural or city holdings into inalienable and indivisible family properties. 5. That they subject the stock exchange and trading to strict regulation. 6. That they reorganize the tax system which weighs too heavily today on small owners and make it more equitable by reforming particularly those taxes which increase the cost of living and by establishing, in general, a system of taxes through which the burden of the poor and the rich will be proportionate to their ability to pay,- XII "THE REVOLUTION." LAND DISTRIBUTION The revolution of 1911, which inaugurated the present régime, had begun chiefly as a political drive against the old dictator, Diaz. Quickly it changed, and was to be expected to change, into a demand for reform. Oppression was unbeliev- ably gross and could not go on indefinitely. The course of the revolution has been, however, obscure. We are still close to it; that may be why it is hard to grasp. The more important reason is that it is not at all sharply defined. 27 An Introduction to Mexico If it were, for example, a Socialist revolution, we would see it demand common ownership of industry, trade and farm lands. But there is nothing of the sort. Certain of the old communal village-lands are restored and personal ownership of small farms is a general aim of the law. Even large estates may re- main. As to industry, regulation is provided in behalf both of labor and the Mexican nation. There is a strong bias against foreign and in favor of Mexican ownership. There has been much violence, much use of the word Social- ist, much violation of both assumed and real rights, much con- fiscation, much agitation of an incendiary nature, much mur- der, and much indoctrination in colleetivist phrases and even ideas. But something more is necessary to make or wish a colJectivist change. It is, however, true that the trend varies from one part of the country to another and from time to time. And it lis further true that the end is not in sight. I t could have been expected that the first political break with the old Individualism would have signalled a drive against Individualism itself. And so it happened. There has been much backing and filling all along. And the whole movement while hardening now into a definite mold is still uncertain of itself and still subject to change either without notice or with the notice of further violence and further revolutions. As the revolution developed, four situations exploded. The first was the old one of landlordism, a burden from the begin- ning and, far worse than it was a hundred years earlier. It has been Mexico's greatest economic evil. The 1904 Catholic meeting described its tragedy. A social change leaving land- lordism untouched would have been unthinkable. An agri- cultural country, rural Mexico is made up for the most part of villages, whether free or on the estates. I t is not a country of isolated rural homes. There is a community life even when it is the community llife of quasi-dependents. Oppressed, yet enjoying a degree of community life, not long out of pre- colonial barbarism and savagery and deprived, during the indi- vidualist dispensation, of the normal life of the Church, the peons rose in bloody revolt in many parts of the country. The revolt was more intense in the farm-factory regions of the sugar and kenequen plantations and in the regions of foreign ownership. The drive of the revolution in its early stages was for quick 28 An Introduction to Mexico division of the landed estates and the return of the village-lands that the Juarez laws had dispersed. In both cases violence and the equivalent of confiscation were the practice. Either as to ownership or as to violent and confiscatory seizure hardly anything else could have ibeen expected. As to ownership the collectivist notion of large collective farms, owned and admin- istered by the government, would hardly enter the minds of the plantation laborers or their leaders. The tradition of Mexico is all in favor of some form of regulated personal ownership and of non-governmental associative life. There was indeed talk of the laborers' entering joint rental contracts to adminis- ter the estates cooperatively and gradually buy them out. But this too implies a form both of personal ownership and asso- ciated life and was, in fact, advocated by the Mexican Catholic social movement. Vliolence was to be expected. The first revolutionary lead- ers—Madero, Huerta and Carranza—had no thought of a thorough-going social change. They were of the old school. But Carranza, himself a large landowner, had to accede to the drive for land reform to create his political future. Zapata, a people's hero in the south, smaller uprisings nearly all over the country, such bandit leaders as Villa, and the Yucatan ex- perience forced the program of the Carranza government to- ward land distribution. With the country in anarchy, mass seizures of land, whether under the cover of law or not, had bfecome common. The government in its land program has gone through the motions of providing compensation. The assessed value of the lands for taxation purposes is, however, taken as the true value, although low assessment had been the practice. The owners, when paid at all, are paid in almost worthless govern- ment certificates. All along, too, there has been much seizure of estates by political officials for their own personal owner- ship and use; they have wanted to establish themselves in the landed class and have found it easy to attain landed wealth. In spite of all the turmoil not much land has been, in fact, distributed to small owners. Limitations still placed on land distribution even leave a large part of the people unable to obtain farms for themselves. 29 An Introduction to Mexico XIII THE LABOR MOVEMENT. FOREIGN OWNERSHIP The second explosion was that of city labor. Their oppres- sion had been* deep and terrible. It was, however, less than that of farm laborers. Moreover they were fewer. Railroad men had already organized but had stood aloof. The Catholic labor associations were small and were largely educational, religious and insurance organizations. In the spirit of Indi- vidualism, the laws had put almost insurmountable barriers in the way of unions. A small syndicalist group, derived in part from the Spanish revolutionary movement and the American I WW, existed, but it was more like a group of conspirators. It had revolutionary fervor, however, and had backed Carranza and Zapata. As the CROM, a labor federation, it rose to power under Calles. Strangely an advanced labor code was written into the Con- stitution without labor pressure or even much labor guidance. By some this anomaly is explained as a result of the fact that since practically all industrial companies at that time were owned and managed by foreigners, a labor code, helping many Mexicans and hurting very few, was a part of the general drive of "Mexico for the Mexicans." This may have been a motive. But the form in which it was couched remains unex- plained. According to a Catholic lawyer in Mexico City, a leading member of the committee that dealt with the labor article in the Constitution was a lawyer of the old and antj- Catholic school. He knew nothing of the subject. He had his son secure material on it. His son, a friend of members of the Catholic social movement in Mexico City, went to them for help. They furnished the program of the Federation of Cath- olic Labor Associations, mentioned above, and some of the voluminous Catholic social writings in Spanish. It was kept secret on both sides. The labor article in the Constitution shows at any rate signs of such an origin. Under the labor article and with the patronage of Obregon and especially Calles, the labor movement grew strong. Since then labor strength has declined. One administration split the movement and tried to keep it quiet. The old CROM has suffered much. Labor, in general, is fighting with its back to the wall but still has some support from the government. 30 An Introduction to Mexico At the 1904 Catholic Farm Congress the speaker who sum- marized the meeting emphasized a third explosive situation, the continuous growth of foreign ownership, particularly by Americans, and its danger to the Mexican masses and the middle class. Both Juarez and Diaz had encouraged foreign ownership. Mexico was being swallowed up. Its industry, banking and trade were, in large part, foreign owned. Its lands were falling into foreign hands. Reform of its economic life meant action against foreign ownership. Clash With for- eign governments was thus inevitable. Even regulation of the property rights of the foreigners meant a clash. Since many of the owners were Americans and since the United States had then a policy of trying to represent European governments in the Caribbean countries, the clash would center in Mexican- American relations. At first the violence of the revolutionary bands, caused most of the difficulty. Then it became the question of the recogni- tion of a President who had come to power following the assasi- nation of his predecessor and, as it was charged, a murder which he had inspired if not directed. But all along, the third stage of the issue was the most important*, it was whether American property rights would be free from confiscation or even from much regulation. The controversy dragged on for years and finally was solved by a compromise. The oil and mining companies formed the chief group in the controversy. In the long view of things, and even while they suffered consid- erable losses during the course of the controversy, they seem to have been victorious. A second group is the owners of lands. Those whose land had been expropriated have received little or nothing. But the quantity expropriated has not been great. In recent years the economic "revindications" of the revo- lution so violently fought for have grown less and less. The land distribution program has lost intensity. The labor pro- gram has weakened immeasurably. The foreign Owners are still in Mexico. At the same time, certain Mexicans have risen in the business and landed world and have done so largely through political power. Nevertheless the Mexican government still speaks in terms of an advancing social revolution. The government is now in the midst of a six-year program that in its economic phases still emphasizes land distribution, the labor program' and regu- 31 An Introduction to Mexico lation of foreign ownership. Far more markedly than in the earlier period, it dwells upon farm cooperatives. It speaks be- sides of organization by industries for economic self-govern- ment. , The present program realizes far more than the earlier one the need pf saving the land through irrigation, improve- ment of the technique of farming and the development and protection of the physical wealth of the country. The change to a social system that will work for the com- mon good in Mexico still lies, however, in the future. I t may come gradually through administration of the present laws and changes in them and through the action of economic organiza- tion. Otherwise Mexico faces sometime another social revo- lution.. For the social injustice continues. XIV THE CHURCH AND SOCIAL CHANGES All during the violent part of the revolution, churches were being outraged and Bishops and priests attacked. When the revolution had in 191.7 reached the point of writing a new Con- stitution, the old persecuting article of the old Constitution was repeated. Amendments, were even added that would still further subject the life of the Church to the desires of what- ever government officials might happen federally and in the States to be in power. Partly this .was a carry-over from Individualism. Individualist enmity to the Church had all àlong persisted. The old Diaz elements were strong in the new revo- lution ;• Carranza had, been himself a Diaz State-governor and was a. landlord. The largest part , of the revolutionary group that wrote the Carranza Constitution was political, anti-foreign and individualistic (but in behalf of Mexican aspirants to wealth) rather than desirous of a social revolution within the country. They had grown up during a generation when the Church was despised and under threatened or active persecu- tion. They had been trained by Masonry. Their course as to the Church might have been foretold. Neither did those leaders of the revolution who wanted it to mean social change think of the Church as their possible friend. They probably knew nothing of the Catholic meet- ings under Diaz, They probably did not think that the village- lands .whose restoration they fought for were of Catholic inr 32 An Introduction to Mexico spiration. Under the competition of machine-made goods and the legal ban, the old guild structure had almost wholly col- lapsed. They knew little of the early colonial fight for an Indian civilization. Most of them knew nothing of the Cath- olic Labor Federation's program for minimum wages, unions, profit sharing, workers' ownership, social insurance and land distribution—a program issued when Madero, the politico, was still in power, months before the first State law on land distri- bution, two years before the first federal law and four years before the Constitutional provisions on land and labor were adopted. If they knew of all of these or any of them, still the cumu- lative impression in theiir minds was that the Church was against a social change. The experience of the revolutionary period was fresh in their minds. In the early part of this period the method of getting land was either outright and vio- lent seizure or at best something verging on violence. All along reasonable compensation has been lacking. The Church is against both violence and confiscation. Opposition to vio- lence and confiscation would be thought to be, and certainly could be made out to be, opposition to land distribution itself. The new labor movement in its early stages was likewise vio- lent and much given to syndicalist terms and even ideas. On the side of the chief Church spokesman there was doc- trinaire silence about the restoration of the village-lands sys- tem. There was a hesitation to advocate land distribution to the limits of Catholic social teaching, which would have gone much farther than the terms of the Constitution. There was an insistence on trying, in rivalry with the existing unions, to establish Catholic labor unions out of the old labor associa- tions. Moreover, the matter of foreign ownership and the status of the oil and mining industries was neglected. The cleavage was thus widened between the social revolution and the Church in Mexico. Yet the earlier violent seizures of property were declining. In time it could be expected that a satisfactory form of payment would be worked out for ex- propriated lands. The labor movement was stabilizing itself. The Catholic labor union was very weak. The influence of the Church was slight. In the main there was Catholic agree- ment with the economic aims of the revolution. There was thus no reason in the social revolution for a feud between gov- 33 An Introduction to Mexico ernment and Church, as there had been reason under the old Individualism. Friendship should have come soon. Yet in 1926 the government launched a new blow at the Church that threatened its very life. XV THE PERSECUTION What was the cause for the new persecution? The Arch- bishop of Mexico City had indeed just given an interview to a Mexican newspaper man in which he said that the Bishops were still in favor, as of course they would be, of trying to change the persecuting features of the Constitution. The in- terview was, in fact, an act of charity of an old man to a re- porter who had been ill and was being paid on commission and in need of money. It was not an announcement at a time, when the oil controversy with the United States was feverish, of an immediate campaign of the Mexican bishops to amend the Constitution. The Mexican secret service undoubtedly knew this. Yet the federal government took this occasion to launch a persecution. From the social-economic point of view, which the revolution proclaimed was its sole purpose, the persecution had no valid reason. The Church was on the side of the main economic aims of the revolution, if not all its methods. Cath- olic organizations had advocated those aims back in the Diaz period and in the Madero period; and violent taking of land was declining. Those leaders of the government who wanted the revolution to serve the people did indeed think that the Church was the enemy of the revolution. But the Church was weak. Moreover had they thought a little, inquired but a little, they would have changed their minds as to the social teaching of the Church. In December 1924, the Archbishop of Mexico City had publicly endorsed the earlier programs of the Catholic meetings. Politically the 1926 persecution seems to have been a jockeying by the Obregon and Agrarista factions in the Calles government for importance in administering the revolutionary laws in order to retain power and pave the way to a second elec- tion of Obregon. Of two factions one was "agrarian" and for Obregon and the other was a labor faction. The labor faction 34 An Introduction to Mexico In Z Zrg'- 0 r g a n i 2 m S * * * city labor and farm labor. In the agrarian field its organizations were leading in é more e s s v i o l e n t ™ r e permanent devdopmenTS S J w . n » 1 ^ ^ a g a i n s t . t . h e o l d C T chaotic and unorganized agrarian seizure or petitioning. Its power in the city labor I I i S fZSt STeme- T h e c a b i n e t o f f i c e r s administering the land labor, oil mining and foreign-ownership clauses of the Constitution were of the labor faction. This was the whole social part of the revolution. There was nothingTeft for the upon i f ° U P W i t h C X C e p t t h e C h u r c h c l a u se- They seized , Within the Calles cabinet it was the Agrarista faction which administered the persecution. From that date began the raSd decline of the land, labor and foreign-ownership phLes of fhe ztr<- D r r a c y had> indeed> S S Z S S * r r e d e f i n i t e l y the forms of the Z Z a n d P° l i t i c a l dictatorships, corruption the rise of politicians to wealth, and the conscious or unconscious use of persecution and a school pro^am to mask the failure to continue the social changes. T w ? e l e m e i ï ^ men usmgffipolitical office for personal S t h and men S w to Îhetonf'TÏ M " " t h C Ch^h-came more and 3?| tothe front The Mexican equivalent of Kluxism, which had ¿ S S u I l y r r t U r e d u n^er Diaz and Juarez'and indeed most of their predecessors, when an irremediable conflict was waged between the Church and pagan Individualism now ruled Mexico when the social changes which the revolution proclaimed were save for the methods used) full I the stream of Catholic social teaching. From the beginning of the r e v " ution there had been many (witness C a r r a r a and, p e r h a p s ' f e argest part of the Constitutional Convention) who paid only lip service to social justice and who were children in nearly every sense of the nineteenth century. Now the old anti- religious hatred became sovereign. And the school that guided them, as it guided the nineteenth century: régime was the Masonry of Individualism and Secularism The persecution began and continued. It should never should have soon ended. It continué u n S the 1929 modus vivendi and began , àgain in 1932 ' Yet to speak of a persecution beginning and subsiding and starting again is to speak relatively. The persecution has been con- 35 An Introduction to Mexico tinuous; it existed before 1926 and after 1929; it has varied simply in intensity and in the backing given it by the central government. Its chief recent elements have been a drastic and outrageous limitation of the number of priests in the States, the actual prohibition of religious education and anti-religious education in all schools. Just now no one sees its ending. But it has to end and when it ends the process of creating a Chris- tian. civilization will continue and the Church will go on being the teacher of its principles and the inspirer of them. . Under the 1917 Constitution (Art. 130), the States are to determine the maximum number of priests "according to the needs of each locality." Another Article guarantees the right of a person "to practice all ceremonies, devotions or observ- ances of his creed, either in: places of public worship or at homey"; (Art. .24). Fourteen States have violated the latter Article to the extent of riot permitting even one priest to serve. Oyer 35,000 cities,-towns and villages in these fourteen States wholly lack religious care save from priests in hiding. In no other .State is the permitted number of priests-anything but inadequate.. Perhaps the best is Morelos; forty priests are allowed for its 223. communities, in which live a population of 132,723. Aguascalientes allows two for 443 communities and 132,900 people; Durango allows two for 1,69.1 communities and 493,530 people;- Hidalgo, allows five for 667,000 people and 2,481 communities;. Michoacan allows thirty-three for 4,994 communities and Over a million people. There is no reasonable conclusion possible. save that even the Constitution is here broken. ; "The. needs of each, locality" in order that everyone may "practice all ceremonies, devotions or observances of his creed" are not the criterion of the law,.. When the best condi- tion is.that;forty priests have to care for 223 communities— one priest to eight communities—and when others range from eighty communities to one priest, to 800 to 1, and fourteen States allow no priest to function whatsoever, the situation is plainly an attack on freedom of religion.1 1 N O T E or THE EDITORS: A S this is going to press the news from Mexico tells of "a partial alleviation of the situation of the Church" in the midst of a great increase in the drive to accomplish the social side of the Mexican program. Since 1926 the reverse, as this report shows, has been true; the Church was being persecuted more as the social part of the changes was declining. The situation is still, however, very much in the balance. 36 An Introduction to Mexico XVI ILLITERACY. INDIANISM ¿ S t t } 1 « ® • m n i n e t e ^ h w-nt1i r v T d o u b t t h a t t h e individualist nineteenth century, as well as demoralizing the Mexican m 3 W « m i L d a e c v s T t tirrnomic hai i ™ illiteracy. It had deprived the Church schools of their cu^tZ mary means of support and had failed to eLblish [ n s ead a comparable system of secular educaSn The Cath SeSTdt^PS ?Tod had pointed to the Mm country A, t f c a d v o c a t e d a new system of schools for the country. As the persecution waned and as the money system of economy permitting support from tuition fees, grew c S ohe schools had grown in the Diaz period. Bu fhe Churdi did not do enough. Moreover it was hard pressed; a priest in f o r e k x a mP^, arranged for a parish organlzat on o a school S h ° P I ° r d e r t 0 g C t f u n d s t 0 build and Support r , , J ? U F i n g t h e f a r l i e r P®™6 o f t h e revolution, the educational program was alternately encouraged and staged The S v eminent recently has turned more consistently S the promo X ? lM i f f e ^ a the P-hibitUof c S X ffil S P ® ! t has been trying to enforce what is called Socialist education. Some of the disillusioned friends of he Mexican revolution see both in the so-called SocialisTeducat on thne m i n d s e o f T h r U t i T , a -quieting c o m j S n s S iS me minds of the revolutionary leaders both for a failure to S rii'fwSV vTomic aims of.revoiuti°n h I B M r f Y e l m a country in which the families of the Church-haters are Catholics (Obregon sending to Arkona or his fiance s parish priest, who had been exiled by Obreionhim sdf, to celebrate his marriage; the Sacrament of C o n £ a r i o n administered privately in the home and at the r e q u e s t a high government official by a Bishop who was "in hiding" from he same official; a government official withdrawing his 3 from a Catholic school just before he closed it oW P esident Diaz never stepping foot in a church in Mexico and t E f S h i s O W n P r f v a t e chaplain; Ca fe taken to a Catholic hospital in Los Angeles and having holy p i c S 37 An Introduction to Mexico in his home: so the stories have it), vagaries of all sorts can be expected. Their combining what is called Socialist education with anti-religious education may be in part due to their own par- tial betrayal of the aims of the revolution. Still one wonders whether the stronger reason is that they are turning to what they call Sociaist education in the hope of rearing a generation of Mexicans who will finish what they have hardly begun. From what can be learned, the "Socialist" education is a combination of anti-religious education, some of the maunder- ings of pedagogy mixed with good pedagogy, and an emphasis on social obligations in economic life. It is in part vicious, in part atheist, in part good. The social philosophy is not Social- ist but social on a humanitarian and anti-religious basis. Given a different basis the social-economic aim would be not only not anti-Catholic but eminently Catholic. The social nature of all economic activity and of economic rights in work and prop- erty is a thoroughly Catholic idea. In Mexico it commonly happens that even those who think they are not Catholics and are avowedly anti-Catholic cannot escape the influence of the fight waged and, then, partially lost by the Church to create a Catholic civilization. When the Church-haters talk of the social nature of property, when they glorify the possibilities of the old Indian stock of Mexico, when they are fired with anger at oppression and now at a largely thwarted social change, they draw their inspiration from their own Catholic heritage and environment. The dignity of all men in the Catholic Faith and the Catholic brotherhood of all men are ingrained in their souls. They cannot escape the effects of the early effort at temporary and regulated trustee- ships which left its mark even on its tragic successor, the sys- tem of landed estates. They cannot escape the effect of the village-lands, the small farms in many parts of the country, the associative life, the missions. They cannot escape the long Catholic generations going to Mass, receiving the sacraments, celebrating their holy days. To recount the lingering traces of the old Indian paganism in Mexico, an American wrote a book, Idols Behind Altars. There are such traces, of course, more strongly marked here, less marked there: after fifteen centuries of Catholicity there are still the old pagan fairies in Ireland; Emerson turned from 38 An Introduction to Mexico imageless Puritanism to Pantheism; pagan gods were still wor- shiped in the the early Middle Ages; Satan worship is not yet dead; witch-burning and witch-hanging had a recrudescence after the Reformation; spiritualism is a religion today. The more important truth is not the traces of paganism but that even the anti-Catholics are partially Catholics; there are "altars behind idols." Apart from their vagaries, they want what the Church wants because the Church wants it and because the Church has inspired them to want it; but they think that the real source of their inspiration is against them and they fight their natural ally and spiritual and moral leader. Here is the greatest tragedy of modern Mexico—not the tragedy of the persecuted, pitiful as it is, but the tragedy of the persecutors. XVII THE FUTURE In a country so young and so recently out of pre-colonial pagan barbarism and savagery a person has to expect extremes of good and evil, failures and false starts, swirling turrents and backwaters, saints and men like that early European Count Baldwin who had hoped and planned during a lifetime of war, rapine and licentiousness to die a monk in a monastery that he himself had built and who did indeed so die. The quick for- mation of a whole civiization in Mexico, completely Catholic, was doomed by the very nature of the case. But the process goes on. The partial defeat of the Church, the tacit accept- ance of much of that defeat, the dry-rot that set in, the indus- trial-individualist crisis and the long subjection of the Church are none of them permanent. The Church teaches the way to live as well as the way to die; the way to civilization as well as the way to heaven. The technique of civilization is not for the Church to dictate. But the spirit and principles of civi- ization belong to it. The social revolution has demanded schools and the end of illiteracy. The schools should be non-religious, the revolution has said; and here the revolution has clashed again with the Church and with nearly all tradition, even the pagan. Nor is it only that the Church wants its right respected to educate in its own schools. It is against non-religious education in the 39 An Introduction to Mexico public schools,, as well, and superlatively against the anti- religious education. Mexico is still Catholic although the process of demoraliza- tion goes on apace. And when the Church returns, Bishops, priests and laity will have the opportunity to join in all the good of the Mexican revolution, its land distribution, its farm cooperatives, its labor standards enforced by law, its labor organizations, its recent turn toward a fully organized economic life, its land development and agricultural education program, its emphasis on education in social obligations, its opposition to economic rule by foreigners, its development of an art and culture in keeping with the Mexican genius and many other of its aims. The Pastoral Letter of the Mexican Hierarchy (1935) entitled "Liberty for the Church—Work of the Church for Social Betterment," is an indication of what is in mind. Yet it will be hard to grasp the opportunity. The follow- ers of the revolution will be suspicious. Memories of the per- secution will stand in the way of a full-hearted acceptance of the good in the new program. The great landowners, even those who rose to the aristocracy through ownership of the con- fiscated Church endowments will try as they have done from the beginning to deflect Catholic policy from allegiance to a Catholic civilization. It will be no short and placid sailing. XVIII AMERICAN POLITICAL INFLUENCE Waves of strange thought will beat always on Mexico from a world that is trying, often in wrong ways, to establish the elements of civilization in a machine society. Mexico joined in the mistaken ways that the world followed in the nine- teenth century. She suffered for it and is now trying to fight the bad past. There will be continuous temptation to join every future world movement, whatever its nature. The great difficulty always will lie in how to take the actual good from the rest of the world, which will consist chiefly of greater knowledge and of new ways and means of action, and how to pass it through the Mexcan genius and the Catholic view of life. We, her next-door neighbor, will be the most open both to helping her and hurting her. Thus far we have done far from well. 40 An Introduction to Mexico Poinsett, the first American minister to Mexico, introduced Masonic lodges of the York rite. Against the dominant Scotch rite lodges he interfered for several years in the York lodges on the side of those who favored a loose federal govern- ment. This was, he held, an advocacy of American principles. But a federal government also served to oppose British influ- ence, and especially served to weaken Mexican control over the northern border-country which twenty years later, because of this, became more easily ours. Poinsett, the meddling minister, is not forgotten in Mexico. Poinsett's interference set a precedent in the myriad changes of Mexican politics. One outstanding case at the beginning of the Mexican War was the agreement with Santa Ana for safe passage to Mexico and its Presidency in exchange for a promise to treat liberally with the United States over the annexation of Texas and California. Another was the agreement with Juarez's representatives in 1859 to give him recognition as President in return for a promise of still more territory, per- petual rights-of-way across the Mexican isthmus, passageways from the border to the west coast and much land to American railway builders—an agreement that later developed into an astounding treaty with him, which our Senate fortunately re- jected, providing for a protectorate. Another was the recog- nition withheld from Huerta early in the present revolutionary period. In the first two cases we interfered clearly for imperialistic purposes. In the third case we had, indeed, a horror of recog- nizing as President a man whom we charged with murdering his predecessor; but Huerta was also thought to lean toward the British oil companies and against ours and this influ- enced the decision against him. In all three cases our recogni- tion and help apparently determined who should be President. And in the aid given Juarez, a particularly vicious blow was struck for an added and sincere, but cruel, unjust and stupid reason. It might seem that there could be fewer things worse than interfering in a neighbor's political life to further our imperial- ism and enhance the profit of our citizens. A worse thing was the additional motive of our action. The man who dealt first with Juarez stated it: "The maintenance of the Liberalists in power," he said, "is an object worthy of the ardent moral co- 41 An Introduction to Mexico operation of our government." In a report that tells of promises made to aid our economic and political imperialism this may appear hypocritical. But there is no reason to think he was not sincere. He spoke the American mind of that time. The "Liberalists" who were worthy of our ardent moral co- operation were the ardent exponents of competitive Indi- vidualism. XIX THE EFFECTS Taking territory and seeking to put Mexico under a protec- torate was not so bad as trying to violate the Mexican soul and crush the growth of a Catholic civilization. We had the excuse of the dry-rot in the old régime, its establishment of an oppressive landed aristocracy and its hesitancy to adopt even the good in the nineteenth century life. The extreme individ- ualist faction inside Mexico had the same excuse. Mexico her- self would have dealt, even if slowly, with these matters. Yet we, foreigners, felt it our duty to be big brother to Mexico and for the profit of our citizens lead it into the path we were treading. That the Church stood against Individualism in Mexico was merely further proof of the righteousness of our cause. It bothered us none that Juarez, our favorite, should have stripped worship, education and charity of their endow- ments. For the Catholic Church, it was said, was always against progress. Besides the Catholic Church was not Prot- estant. It was even Spanish. The Catholic religion, certainly or at least probably, had to be stripped of influence in the country if Mexico was to progress I We were convinced that progress meant material development through Individualism. We stood on the side of the man, Juarez, who completed the process of forming an individualistic governmental struc- ture in Mexico so as to break the old village-land system, weak- en or destroy the associative life of the villages and cities and open the door wide to a businessmen's society in Mexico. We knew that our citizens would be high among the economic rulers of the country. And so it happened. Railroads, oil, metals, refining and smelting, power plants and utilities, cattle, sugar, fibers, rubber and coffee estates and some manufactur- ing came to be owned by Americans. The Civil War, revolu- tions against Juarez, and the French effort to establish Maxi- 42 An Introduction to Mexico milian as emperor prevented much investment until the late seventies. Investment grew slowly until the nineties. It jumped from half a billion to over a billion and a half from 1902 to 1912. We owned then 78 per cent of the mines, 72 per, cent of the smelters, 58 per cent of the oil, and 68 per cent of the rubber; and what we did not own of these, other for- eigners generally owned. We helped Mexico's economic development. But we did so in the typically individualist style. We first helped to change Mexico's governmental structure to one that would pre- vent much governmental intervention in economic life. We then secured concessions and property rights, often in shady ways (as shady as the ways in which the wealth of our own country was at the same time falling into a few hands). Finally we sought to keep our emigrant capital a legal citizen of the United States. Sub-soil rights, for example, under traditional Spanish law belong to the community. Diaz transferred much oil land into simple ownership. When in the revolution Mexico tried to re- gain the earlier concept that these rights are a matter of limited concession, our government hastened to help our in- vestors and all foreign owners. Our credit power and our power over the import of arms gradually put the Mexican gov- ernment where it had to compromise vitally upon its program. Embargoes on arms, under the circumstances, have made the Mexican government almost a protectorate of ours. Time after time the prevention of arms shipments into Mexico, ex- cept to the government, has maintained the present group in power. XX OUR INFLUENCE—GOOD AND BAD Geography has made the United States Mexico's greatest danger and greatest potential help. French writings, American political influence and British trade, all shared in foreign pres- sure during the early period of the nineteenth century. Ameri- can influence in all three fields has since then grown steadily. Our political influence has become paramount. Our economic power has easily become first. American thought and writings have grown immeasurably in influence. The currents are many. Never since the first generation 43 An Introduction to Mexico of Spanish domination, and then only in the official policy and in the Church, has there been such confidence in Indian great- ness and such a determination to create an essentially Mexi- can civilization. But then it was to be a Catholic Mexican civi- lization. Strong elements in that tradition persist even among, one might say, especially among, the avowed anti-Catholics who proclaim that the Faith and its servants are their enemy. But along with our general influence in Mexico upon styles, architecture, food and movie morals, the influence upon the very propagandists of a new and native civilization, which has been exercised by our own American rebels to American life has been considerable. The ideas borrowed from the United States are chiefly in matters of technique, in that cowardly philosophy of technique, pragmatism, and in real or false science. But to Mexican minds mere technique and a timid philosophy of experiment are unsatisfactory. Methods in pedagogy and the pragmatical ap- proach suffer, therefore, a change when they reach the Mexican cactus. The effect seems to be an over-emphasis on the new, an exaggeration of the role of teacher and a sloughing off of the experimental approach. In Mexico's six-year Plan, inaugurated in 1934, we find this: "Primary schools, in addition to excluding all religious teaching, shall furnish a true scientific and rational answer to each and all of these questions which must be solved in the mind of pupils, in order that they may form an exact and positive conception of the world surrounding them and of the society in which they live; otherwise the school would fail in its social mission." In other words, there is no God but science and the teacher in the primary grades knows all the answers. In a preceding paragraph of the Plan it is said that "the teach- ings . . . must be those set by the State." The result is a strange hybrid, a union of State and science under the State. Since the teacher answers all questions and cannot conceivably answer them right, there is, and must be expected to be, much distortion in education and much denial of the best in Mexican life. Vicious fancies of naturalistic schools of pedagogy, long exploded elsewhere, become the word of science and of the primary teachers, and then enter the life of the Mexican vil- lagers, whom the government has committed, itself to save and now through this education would still further demoralize. 44 An Introduction to Mexico Both the new knowledge and an experimental approach, when guided by right standards, are necessary. The chief diffi- culty is a lack or a confusion or a borrowing of standards (the very weakness of pragmatism), or a lapse into the old pagan standards. But we have also helped Mexico. The advice given the Mexican labor movement by the American Federation of Labor has helped to stabilize it. The experience of United States Catholics with Individualism and material advance, uncompli- cated by persecution, has served several times to help Mexican Catholics to distinguish between the good and the bad. Oppo- sition to armed intervention by the United States, expressed both publicly and privately by friends of Mexico or merely by enemies of imperialism, has several times prevented or delayed such intervention. Our government has been most kind to Mexico's religious exiles. Yet our influence has been in the main bad, including the direct efforts, however slight in effect, to turn Mexico to those Protestant sects most compatible with competitive industrialism. XXI THE PRESENT Ironically, considering our long reputation, it was an American Ambassador, Dwight W. Morrow, who paved the way for the agreement on the modus vivendi of 1929 between the Mexican government and the Church. During the present resurgence of persecution Catholics of the United States, in sympathy and knowing well the bad record of our govern- ment both in partially creating the very conditions that have permitted persecution and in maintaining the present group in power, have asked our government to help end the presecu- tion. Ambassador Daniels' undiscriminating praise of the Mexican government's educational system, a center of persecu- tion and irreligion, has brought continued attacks upon him. What he said made it seem as if our government favored the persecution, an impression which at this stage of our national development seems unquestionably false. In the light both of the good and the bad in our past record, it appears that our government should again do something to overcome the perse- cution there. Wilson, for example, once exacted a promise of 45 An Introduction to Mexico religious liberty from Carranza's representative as a condition of diplomatic recognition. It can act the more readily be- cause there is no intrinsic opposition between government and Church. The hope of Mexico remains the Catholic Church and a growth of Catholic national life. This persecution is but an interlude. The life of the Church will go on, as indeed it has gone on, to a degree even during the persecution. Baptizing, confirming, saying Mass, hearing Mass, receiving Penance and Holy Communion, marrying and rearing families, learning the truths of the Faith, receiving a Catholic education, celebrating the holy days, dying in the Faith, will go on. The dignity of a man and the brotherhood of all, without exception, will be inculcated directly and by the example of an all-inclusive Faith and worship. Mexico still has to undergo its economic reform on the land, in the factory and in relation to the foreigner. The Church will be its friend. Unthreatened by persecution, undominated by a remote monarchy, not tramelled by a local aristocracy and able to draw strength and guidance from a Catholic world no longer so 'beleaguered, the Church in Mexico can and will be the moral and spiritual leader in the establishment of an eco- nomic system that will serve the common good of the people of Mexico. The persons engineering the social change in Mexico have already learned from the Church that the resources, physical and human, of a country should serve the good of all; that along with individual rights the natural community life of people in their work is a first agency of the common good; and that government is to be used freely, but not as the sole agency, for social justice. Limited rights, association, and gov- ernment action are parts of that natural law on which the Catholic life is based. The organization that the Church in Mexico has estab- lished to band the laity together for Catholic work is called Catholic Action. Its work is in the realm of the spiritual and of education of laymen and laywomen so that they will know and love and work for a Catholic life and civilization. The growth of a Catholic civilization in Mexico will, in large part, depend upon the laity united in this general organization. They will take up the old task that Catholics undertook at the beginning and that, in spite of failures, of dry-rot, of the intro- 46 An Introduction to Mexico duction of nineteenth century idiocies, of persecution and of defamation, has been shouldered all the time. Their native and unassuming heroism is on their side. The most closely corresponding Catholic organization in the United States, the National Catholic Welfare Conference, can be of help. Cath- olics of the United States seem to have as their special future role that of helping Catholics in Mexico to distinguish between the good and the bad in the thought and practice of that mod- ern world which in large part reaches Mexico through the United States. APPENDIX A N. C. W. C. STUDY CLUB OUTLINE (Printed with Approval of the N. C. W. C. Study Club Committee) Lesson I T H E BEGINNINGS. (Sections I-IV) TOPICS TOR DISCUSSION 1. The two presuppositions (Section I) . 2. The inspiration respon- sible for the good elements in Spanish colonization (Section I ) . 3. The central aim (Section II) . 4. The "prejudices" preventing the realization of aims (Section II) . 5. The Quiroga program (Section III) . 6. Com- parisons of the Quiroga program with current programs (Section I I I ) . 7. The clue of Religion (Section IV). PAPERS 1. The New Laws of the Indies. 2. The Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Lesson II T H E DECLINE. INDIVIDUALISM. (Sections V-VII) TOPICS TOR DISCUSSION 1. The establishment of a, kind of Indian vassalage: its reasons (Sec- tion V). 2. The difference between later colonial Mexico and our old Slave South (Section V). 3. Mixed good and evil in Mexico (Sections V, VI). 4. Factors in the development of Mexican architecture (Section VI). S. How Individualism came to Mexico (Section VII). 6. Individualism versus morality (Section VII). 7. The influence of foreign trade on Mexico (Section VII). 8. Mexico's acceptance of a material change in its consequences (Section VII). PAPERS 1. Individualism (or "Liberalism") as described in Pope Pius XI's "Reconstructing the Social Order." 2. Review of "Latin America and the United States," Catholic Asso- ciation for International Peace, Washington, D. C. 47 An Introduction to Mexico Lesson III T H E INDIVIDUALIST PERSECUTION o r THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. (Sections VIII-X) TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION 1. The doctrinal opposition of Individualism and the Church (Section VIII). 2. Business failure and increased opposition to the Church (Sec- tion VIII). 3. "A wealthy Church" (Section VIII). 4. Persecution (Sec- tion IX). 5. Unpreparedness of the Church (Section IX). 6. Social Effects of Individualism (Section IX). 7. Indian "primitivism" (Section X). 8. The world depression as affecting the possibility of viewing Mexico more objectively (Section X). PAPERS 1. Review one of these three books in the light of Section X: "Mexico, a Study of the Two Americas," Stuart Chase. "Idols Behind Altars," Anita Brenner. "Mexico and Its Heritage," Emest Gruening. Lesson IV T H E CATHOLIC REACTION TO INDIVIDUALISM:. (Section X I ) TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION 1. Early twentieth century meetings. 2. Effects of persecution upon the Church's work against social injustice. 3. Comparison of program with current programs in the United States. 4. The charge of the Church being "reactionary." ' PAPERS 1. Mexican Social Conditions on the Eve of the 1911 Revolution. 2. The Diaz Régime. Lesson V T H E REVOLUTION. (Sections X I I - X n i ) TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION 1. A political revolution changing to a social revolution (Section X I I I ) . 2. The main trend as non-socialist (Section X I I ) . 3. Land pro- gram and effects (Section XII) . 4. Labor program and effects (Section X I I I ) . 5. Foreign ownership program and effects (Section X I I I ) . 6. Possible future revolutions (Section X I I I ) . PAPER 1. Review of Tannenbaum's "Mexican Agrarian Revolution." Lesson VI T H E PERSECUTION. (Sections XIV-XV) TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION 1. The "Individualists" in the revolution and their idea of the Church (Section XIV). 2. The idea of those who wanted social change (Sec- tion XIV). 3. The Church and violence (Section XV). 4. Hesitancies 48 An Introduction to Mexico of Church leaders on certain points (Section XV). 5. The eve of the 1926 persecution. 6. How the 1926 persecution began. 7. Extent of the present persecution. 8, Very recent changes. PAPERS 1. The Mexican Federal and State Laws Against the Church. 2. Reviews of the following: Pastoral Letters of the Mexican Bishops. "Blood-Drenched Altars," Most Rev. Francis C. Kelley. "Chaos in Mexico," Charles S. MacFarland. N. C. W. C. Pamphlets on Mexico. Lesson VII EDUCATION. T H E FUTURE. (Sections XVI-XVII) TOPICS FOR. DISCUSSION 1. Illiteracy (Section XVI). 2. "Socialist" education (Section XVI). 3. Anti-Catholic "Catholics" (Section XVII). 4. When the persecution ends (Section XVII). PAPER 1. Comparison of the main lines of the Mexican revolutionary program with the Catholic program in Section X. Lesson VIII AMERICAN POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC INFLUENCE. ( S e c t i o n s X V I I I - X I X ) TOPICS FOR. DISCUSSION 1. Poinsett and Mexican loss of our Southwest (Section X V I I I ) . 2. Our action at critical moments in Mexican history (Section XVIII). 3. Our relation to Juarez, champion of Mexican Individualism (Section XVIII). 4. United States economic penetration in 1912 (Section XIX) . 5. Action since 1912 (Section XIX). 6. Embargoes on arms (Section XIX) . PAPER 1. Review of some book on United States-Mexico relations in past twenty-five years. Lesson IX SOCIAL AND EDUCATIONAL INFLUENCE. (Sections XX-XXI) TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION 1. American influence on Mexican education (Section XX). 2. Good influence (Section XX). 3. The United States government and the pres- ent persecution (Section XX) . 4. The future and the Church (Section XXI) . 5. Organized Catholic laity in Mexico (Section XXI) . 6. Cath- olics of the United States and Catholic Missions (Section XXI) . PAPER 1. Hopes of Religious Peace in Mexico. THE Catholic Association for International Peace has grown out of a series of meetings during 1926-1927. Following the Eucharistic Congress in Chicago in 1926, representatives of a dozen nations met with Americans for discussion. In October of the same year a meeting was held in Cleveland where a temporary organization called The Catholic Committee on In- ternational Relations was formed. The permanent name, The Catholic Association for International Peace, was adopted at a two-day Conference in Washington in 1927. Annual Confer- ences were held in the same city in 1928, 1929, 1930, 1933, 1934 and 1935; in New York City, 1931; and in Cleveland, 1932. All-day regional Conferences took place in Chicago on Armistice Day, 1930; in St. Louis on Washington's Birthday, 1932; at the University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana, on November 19, 1933; at Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on November 25, 1934; College of Notre Dame of Maryland, Baltimore, February 9, 1935; Villanova College, Villanova, Pennsylvania, May 25, 1935; and at the University of Detroit, November 10, 1935. It is a membership organiza- tion. Its objects and purposes are: To study, disseminate and apply the principles of natural law and Christian charity to international problems of the day; To consider the moral and legal aspects of any action which may be proposed or advocated in the international sphere; To examine and consider issues which bear upon international goodwill; To encourage the formation of conferences, lectures and study circles; To issue reports on questions of international importance; To further, in cooperation with similar Catholic organizations in other countries, in accord with the teachings of the Church, the object and purposes of world peace and happiness. The ultimate purpose is to promote, in conformity with the mind of the Church, "The Peace of Christ in the Kingdom of Christ." The Association works through the preparation of commit- tee reports. Following careful preparation, these are discussed both publicly and privately in order to secure able revision and they are then published by the organization. Additional com- mittees will be created from time to time. The Association solicits the membership and cooperation of Catholics of like mind. It is seeking especially the membership and cooperation of those whose experience and studies are such that they can take part in the preparation of committee reports. The Committees on Ethics, Law and Organization, and Economic Relations serve as a guiding committee on the par- ticular questions for all other committees. Questions involving moral judgments must be submitted to the Committee on Ethics. Publications of the Catholic Associa- tion for International Peace Pamphlet Series— No. 1—International Ethics. No. 2—Latin America and the United States. No. 3—Causes of War, and Security, Old and New. No. 4—Haiti, Past and Present (out of print). No. 5—Francis de Vitoria (out of print). No. 6—American Agriculture and International Affairs. No. 7—Puerto Rico and the United States. No. 8—Europe and the United States—Elements in Their Relationship. No. 9—The Ethics of War. No. 10—National Attitudes in Children. No. 11—Tariffs and World Peace. No. 12—Manchuria—The Problem in the Far East. No. 13—International Economic Life. No. 14—The Church and Peace Efforts. No. IS—War and Peace in St. Augustine's De Civitate Dei. No. 16—Peace Education in Catholic Schools. No. 17—Peace Action of Benedict XV. No. 18—Relations Between France and Italy. No. 19—Catholic Organization for Peace in Europe. No. 20—The United States and the Dominican Republic. No. 21—An Introduction to Mexico. Miscellaneous Series— The World State. Appeals for Peace of Pope Benedict XV and Pope Pius XI . Peace Trends. Syllabus on International Relations. Argentina—Land of the Eucharistic Congress, 1934. Permanent Peace Program of Pope Benedict XV. Reports in Preparation— Nationalism. Is War Justifiable Today? Disarmament and Catholic Doctrine. The World Court. International Cultural Relations. So-called "Over-Population." Catholicism—the Keynote of Pan-Americanism. World Cooperation—Symposium. N. C. W. C. Joint Committee on P e a c e - Peace Statements of Recent Popes. The Christian Way to Peace.