In Quest of El Dorado

by Stephen Graham

"A happy New Year!" said I. "And may you soon get that iron box" I added, involuntarily thinking of what was most on our minds.

So we parted. Even the Iturbide was in a strange condition, most of the servants being in that menacing drunken state which comes after drinking much pulque. But that was small matter. At midnight there outbroke a quintupled clamor over all the city. Hundreds of thousands of revolvers and guns must have been discharged and discharged repeatedly. The sound was of a great general engagement in war. I stood at the window and looked at the dark sky which, however, told nothing of the myriads of bullets flying into it. I was astonished. But little did I guess that Wilfrid Ewart doing the same at his window overlooking that wild street of the "Republic of San Salvador" was in these moments being killed—by a revolver bullet from below.

Yet so it was, and I will not say more here, except that we buried him in the British Cemetery beside the Tlacopan Causeway along which Cortes and the remains of his defeated army slowly retreated on the Noche Triste of July 1, 1520. A few English people stood beside a new-dug grave with tearful eyes and choking hearts. So we laid him to rest far away from his home. There were white roses buried with him. There are lilies growing near him.

I should not perhaps have narrated this happening here but that Wilfrid Ewart has become part of Mexico as Francis Drake became part of Nombre de Dios and the Spanish Main. It was Mexico that took him, sacrificing yet another victim on its Aztec altars. On the day after we buried Ewart another Englishman was killed, George W. Steabben, an English merchant. He was walking along a street with his family when suddenly a shooting affray took place between two parties of Mexicans in cars. Shots went in many directions, several people were wounded, and Steabben was killed. The quarreling parties were mostly officers and deputies—really above the law. Members of the Mexican Parliament enjoy immunity from arrest but nevertheless they are frequently implicated in crimes and outrages.

The social condition of Mexico has evidently greatly changed since Diaz' days. Porfirio Diaz ruled as a Dictator for a quarter of a century and enforced peace upon the country. He was the type of great man that Carlyle sought in history, the hero once found to be obeyed. The obedience to Diaz was very gratifying to foreigners in Mexico. His fame was extraordinary in his day. But now none so poor as to do him reverence. His name is not heard. Streets are not named after him nor monuments raised to him. His name represents bondage and oppression to the masses.

The ten years of civil war and revolution which followed the Diaz régime were no doubt strongly colored by the personal ambitions of aspirants to the Presidency. But the violence of them came from a popular upheaval, a rising out of the depths. What has happened in Mexico is not un-akin to what has happened in Russia.

The Mexican revolution began before the success of the Bolsheviks but it obtained a powerful inspiration from Russia. Mexican politicians came to Europe to study Bolshevism and in one or two States, notably those of Vera Cruz and Yucatan, it can be said that a dictatorship of the proletariat has been achieved. Bourgeois society and the enormous capitalistic concerns of Mexico are menaced by proletarianism.

The force of the law has been greatly weakened by this revolutionary triumph. Every Mexican feels that he is a law to himself and that he must be ready to protect himself should he be set upon. Hence the prevalence of firearms in the possession of citizens—and the many assaults, murders, accidents.

I suppose in no other capital in the world, not even in Russia, could a funeral cortège of a dead Communist be followed by banners inscribed "Viva Anarchia—Long live Anarchy!" Nor could a tram-strike such as we had this January and in an armed battle in the streets and nobody be punished.

There is much that is remarkable about Mexico City. It is an Indian capital, a Spanish capital, and an American capital in one. All three clash, producing a city of strange unrest. The Americans want only business, the Spanish believe they want culture, the Indians want only freedom. Spanish and Indians together make up the Mexican people, which on the whole is mentally deficient. They are loquacious and lose themselves talking. When they take to arms they do so without mathematics. Impregnable as Mexico seems, any civilised nation could defeat her in war—because, to use a colloquialism "she is not all there." That is why, in my opinion, in the first place Cortes with his handful of warriors was able to destroy the Aztec Empire. The Aztecs had a fourth part lacking in their mental equipment. Montezuma, magnificent as he was, was clearly, from a European point of view, something of a half-wit. That half-wittedness the Spaniards married gayly into and have not been able to throw it off. The conqueror has become the conquered.