So quietly was the analysis made, Gordon could not but laugh. “I think your father must be a bit of a cynic.”
“No, señor.” Ramon repeated the gentle shrug. “He merely knows us. In your schools—I know this, for I spent a couple of years in one of your big military academies—you teach that every American boy has a chance to be President. This, of course, is foolish. In the average life of your one hundred of millions, there can only be ten Presidents, so forty-nine million, nine hundred and ninety thousand others of your men have no chance at all. Now we do not teach that. We are simply born with the belief that each one of us is going to be president, if he has to kill all the others. Moreover, in actual practice, we cut without scruple the throats of those who come between us and again what your political speakers would call ‘our God-appointed place.’ As there are many millions of us ingrained with this belief, some bloodshed is bound to result.
“Also my father knows you Yankees. You desire peace, not because it is right, but in order that you may pursue your commercial wars. Between our wars we are good friends, visit and love one another till the time comes for another killing. But you pursue your commerce with absolute ruth. Nothing, to you, the ruin of a competitor; nothing the crushing of children’s and women’s lives in your sweat-shops and factories; no principle of morality or humanity can stem the tide of your greed. Your warfare is far more inhuman than ours; slays its tens of thousands to our thousands; starves your children, debauches your women in a way that is unknown with us. For when they are not hacking one another to pieces our peones live in rude comfort on the haciendas with enough to eat and drink, no more work than they feel like doing, merriment enough in their bailes and fiestas. No, we prefer our own wars; do not in the least desire the slums, sweat-shops, rapacity, and greed that go with your system.”
“In other words,” Gordon suggested, “‘you prefer the frying-pan to the fire’?”
For a moment Ramon looked mystified. Then, as he grasped the application of the strange proverb, he laughed. “Exactly, señor. Why trade devils?”
“So that is how you Mexicans feel?” Gordon commented on these strange ideas after a thoughtful pause. “Then why did you ever let the foreigners in? Now that a hundred thousand of them have invested billions here under guarantees from Mexico to their respective countries, you can never turn them out.”
Ramon’s nod conceded the fact. Not now were the hands of time to be set back. The evolutionary process which was sweeping his country from its ancient foundations, laid in a pastoral age, into the vortex of a detested commercialism, was not to be stayed.
“Why did we do it? We did not. It was the work of Porfirio Diaz. Lerdo de Tejada, whom he overthrew, held to the Mexican idea, and would have built a Chinese Wall around the country to keep the foreigners out. But after him—Diaz, the Flood!” Flicking the ash carelessly from his cigarette, he concluded, with a shrug: “No, we cannot throw them out—now. Some day you gringos will swallow us up even as you swallowed Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Alta California. But in the mean time—we shall fight.”
From these lines the talk turned to more intimate things and, if let alone, they would undoubtedly have become friends. But just then Lee returned and plunged again into family gossip, cutting Gordon out. In fact, she did it so completely that he looked up, surprised, when she addressed him half an hour later.
“We are going for a little walk. You may come—if you choose.”