“Come with me some day ... I will show you,” he offered.
I said that anything he could show me would be greatly appreciated. He promised to snatch an hour or two next Thursday at three. “And when you have seen some of the misery of these people, you will wonder why some of us have not given our lives to ameliorate their lot.”
I said, “the first thing that should be done here—is Hygiene”.
The Minister agreed, “And next is education.” He agreed again but added: “All that depends on the economic position of the country.”
I said, “You have your soil full of richness, your country is richer than almost any other country, why do not you Mexicans get up and possess it, instead of allowing the foreigner to come in and exploit it?”
“Understand ...” he answered, “that after years of oppression, when we were, as it were, a nation of slaves, we gained our liberty, and before we knew what use to make of it, the experienced foreigner came to show us and he took things into his own hands. Today it complicates our machinery beyond words.”
Conversation began to be a mix-up of Spanish, French and English. When the Minister’s interpreter failed in his English, Malbran came to the rescue in French. The Minister understood enough English to prompt in the translations, and I understood enough Spanish to get the spirit of his meaning.
“It must be a wonderful thing,” I said, “to be in a position of power, and to be able to help in the uplift of the workers.”
He said he had devoted twenty years of his life to this task, at the risk of being abused and misunderstood. He told us of his organization of a labor representation within the Government as early as 1916, before Russia ever began her revolution. He said it had been hard work, and things had not gone as they should go, they had been wrongly organized. The revolutions that had occurred one after another in Mexico had not helped the masses.
“Revolution,” he said, “is composed of three factors. The first is propaganda,—the second is armed force and the third is evolution; and we began unfortunately with armed force, the propaganda followed and the evolution was only partial.”