rich and powerful Liberal; he had great concessions in Mexico which had been obtained from President Diaz; it was known that Huerta aimed to make his dictatorship a continuation of that of Diaz, to rule Mexico as Diaz had ruled it, that is, by force, and to extend a welcoming hand to foreign capitalists.  An important consideration was that the British Navy had a contract with the Cowdray Company for oil, which was rapidly becoming indispensable as a fuel for warships, and this fact necessarily made the British Government almost a champion of the Cowdray interests.  It was not necessary to believe all the rumours that were then afloat in the American press to conclude that a Huerta administration would be far more acceptable to the Cowdray Company than any headed by one of the military chieftains who were then disputing the control of Mexico.  Mr. Wilson and Mr. Bryan believed that these events proved that certain “interests,” similar to the “interests” which, in their view, had exercised so baleful an influence on American politics, were also active in Great Britain.  The Wilson election in 1912 had been a protest against the dominance of “Wall Street” in American politics; Mr. Bryan’s political stock-in-trade for a generation had consisted of little except a campaign against these forces; naturally, therefore, the suspicion that Great Britain was giving way to a British “Standard Oil” was enough to arm these statesmen against the Huerta policy, and to intensify that profound dislike of Huerta himself that was soon to become almost an obsession.

With this as a starting point President Wilson presently formulated an entirely new principle for dealing with Latin-American republics.  There could be no permanent order in these turbulent countries and nothing approaching a democratic system until the habit of revolution should he checked.  One of the greatest encouragements to revolution, said the President, was the willingness of foreign governments to recognize any politician who succeeded in seizing the executive power.  He therefore believed that a refusal to recognize any government “founded upon violence” would exercise a wholesome influence in checking this national habit; if Great Britain and the United States and the other powers would set the example by refusing to have any diplomatic dealings with General Huerta, such an unfriendly attitude would discourage other forceful intriguers from attempting to repeat his experiment.  The result would be that the decent elements in Mexico and other Latin-American countries would at last assert themselves, establish a constitutional system, and select their governments by constitutional means.  At the bottom of the whole business were, in the President’s and Mr. Bryan’s opinion, the “concession” seekers, the “exploiters,” who were constantly obtaining advantages at the hands of these corrupt governments and constantly stirring up revolutions for their financial profit.  The time had now come to end the whole miserable business.