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to the Channel in November, it is trebly so now that the British have three times the strength that they then had, and the Germans know it.

This latest German offensive is merely part of the campaign of attrition which Germany embarked upon several months ago. The Germans know that the Allies will strive desperately to regain the ground lost at Ypres, and they hope in repelling these assaults to more than offset the losses they suffered on the attack. In other words, ever since the inception of the deadlock that followed the battle of the Aisne it has been Germany's hope to punish the Allies so terribly that they will be content to leave her with what she has won. As an example of the expense of the battles of this war, David Lloyd George, Chancellor of the British Exchequer, pointed out the other day that in the battle of Neuve Chapelle the British used more ammunition than they consumed in the entire Boer War.

A NEW MEANS OF KILLING

The Germans made possible their gains at Ypres by sending ahead of them in their advance a low-hanging cloud of vapor, probably chlorine gas, which, carried by a favorable wind, poisoned their enemies in the trenches over a front said to have been six kilometers long and two kilometers deep. This noxious fog, it is reported, was liberated from generators in the foremost German trenches manned by men protected by harnesses somewhat similar to the garb of deep-sea divers. The British now aver that they have devised a protection against this terrible weapon, but what the protection is they say not. If they care to, they can hoist the Germans with the latter's own petard, for at Ypres, in the summer, southwesterly winds which would blow from the Allies' lines to the German are more common than the northerly winds of early spring which carried the suffocating blanket of chlorine upon hundreds of Canadians the other day.

The use of such gases in warfare is contrary to the Hague rules and to the best usage of international warfare. From a humanitarian view-point, however, the use of such gases on soldiers is less reprehensible than several other breaches of international usage that have occurred in this war, such as the employment of civilians as shields for soldiers advancing under fire and the bombardment of defenseless towns.

BY SEA AND LAND

An atmosphere of expectancy hangs over the North Sea. England has stopped all shipping between British ports and Holland, and rumors are abroad of impending great events. Both Anglo-French and German squadrons have been reported off the coast of Norway, and cannonading has been heard off the Dutch coast. One of the commonest rumors afloat, and one of the most plausible, is that the British, under cover of their fleet, intend to land an army on the Belgian shore somewhere between Ostend and the Holland border for the purpose of flanking the Germans now fighting along the Yser Canal. course the Germans have done their best to fortify this shore, but it is not impossible that under a heavy fire from the British fleet a landing might be effected. On the last day of the week a despatch from Rome reports that the French cruiser Léon Gambetta had been torpedoed in the Adriatic by an Austrian submarine, with a loss of six hundred men.

IN THE EAST

Of

In the Carpathians the status quo continues. Until the Russians have forced the Uzsok Pass or have been definitely flung back from its gates there will probably be nothing decisive from this field of operations.

The Dardanelles are back on the front pages of newspapers again, having figured little in the news columns since the disastrous bombardment that ended on March 20, after the Allies had lost three battle-ships. The Allies have now succeeded in putting ashore landing parties at several points on the Gallipoli Peninsula and at Kum Kale, at the Asiatic point of entrance to the Dardanelles. They have also captured Enos, in Turkey, on the Ægean Sea. The size of the Allies' army is not mentioned in the official reports, but unofficially it is estimated as about two hundred thousand men. To oppose this force the Turks and Germans have probably at least a quarter of a million men. The task before the Allies is a hard one, but they can go ahead now with more prospects of success than they could ever have had through the efforts of their fleet alone. It now seems that, aside from political considerations, as a purely military feat the effort to win Constantinople by sheer sea power was a mistake, and Winston Churchill, First Lord of the British Admiralty, is coming in for a good deal of criticism in England for making the attempt. New York City, April 28, 1915.

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BY CASPAR WHITNEY

FIRST ARTICLE: THE PLIGHT OF THE AMERICANS

In this and succeeding articles Mr. Whitney records the results of a recent seven months' journey through Mexico, with the express purpose of answering such questions as, What is the matter with Mexico? What is Mexico's future? What do Mexicans think of the United States? Where has our policy toward Mexico been unwise? The articles tell what the author heard and saw. The statements made are sustained by references in The Outlook's possession to persons, places, and sources of information, and in some cases by public documents. Mr. Whitney is well known as traveler, magazine writer, and correspondent, as well as for his special work in establishing high ethical standards in athletics. See the editorial on Mexico on another page.-THE EDITORS

especial seven months' journey of observation which began six weeks after the landing of the United States troops at Vera Cruz-April 21, 1914-and which covered, in effect, all of Mexico.

On a small ranch in the State of San Luis Potosí, not far from the Tamaulipas line, lived in the summer of 1913 a man a little past his prime, with his daughter and niece.

From a home in the Middle Western States that had been wrecked by death they had come several years before to this new country, where the land was cheap and the soil rich, and a powerful Government invited and gave adequate guarantee of safe shelter to settlers.

So they had found and invested their all in this acreage, which by now had passed the arduous preparatory stage and was beginning to repay their faithful labor.

From time to time there had been halts in the pioneering, even reverses, but on the whole they had prospered, sufficiently at least to have built an unpretentious though comfortable house and to be able to write their home friends that the world went well with them in the new country. Then came the breaking of the peace which had held and prospered Mexico for thirty years.

The knowledge that men roamed the country round filled with the lust of bloodletting brought lurking anxiety to the little family, but they passed without molestation through the period which preceded the election of Madero, for the soldiers of Porfirio Diaz were not permitted the habit of loot, and the Constitutionalists had not then penetrated to the immediate vicinity of their property.

Quickly followed the early struggles be

tween Huerta and the Constitutionalists, with Villa operating in Chihuahua and Durango, and Carranza in the States of Coahuila and San Luis Potosí.

From time to time the farmer and his womenfolk heard of the marauding sallies of the ill-fed and uncontrolled Carranza troops, but always they found comfort in the feeling that their nationality would commend them to soldiers fighting anywhere to establish constitutional government, and that their birthright under the Stars and Stripes assured their safety beyond peradventure.

Thus on their farm they remained working, wholly trusting in the immunity from harm which they believed their American citizenship gave them, their hearts stirring with patriotic pride at thought of the farreaching benediction of "Old Glory," and with gratitude, too, for every dollar they possessed and their living were represented by that little farm, to abandon which in midseason meant ruin.

One night they were aroused by voices and loud knocking on the door. Accustomed to wayfarers and to offering the best hospitality their little home yielded, the farmer opened the door without hesitation, and admitted a group of soldiers, who instantly set upon and overpowered and rope-bound. him before the women scarce realized what was happening.

Then the soldiers overpowered the niece and daughter; and every one of these individuals of the " delicate, sensitive race" with whom President Wilson seeks 66 spiritual union" had his share in the rape which came after.

All these facts-I withhold names for obvious reasons-were reported to Secretary of State Bryan, who passed them on to the City of Mexico for attention and explanation. Much parleying went on, but not a particle of reparation has to this writing been exacted by the United States Government for the wretched victims or for the flagrant disregard of the treaty rights under which these, its citizens, went to Mexico.

In June, following the success of the Madero revolution, a band of seventeen ex-Maderistas broke into the home of a German cotton-mill workman at Covadonga, State of Puebla. Having tied the German and his helper to a bed, all seventeen of the ex-Maderistas raped the wife in the presence of her husband-after which they bled her to death.

And then the husband and his helper were also killed.

The fiendish deed being reported home by the local Consul in the absence of his Minister, the German Government immediately sent Admiral von Hinze as Minister to Mexico, with instructions, not only to demand punishment for the perpetrators of the savagery, that such punishment might serve as a future deterrent and a protection to his other nationals, advance agents of German trade in Mexico, but also to exact from Mexico an indemnity as further recognition by that Government of its responsibility to Germany under its treaty rights and the rights under which its subjects had gone to Mexico.

The Admiral's activities resulted in the Mexican Government imprisoning fifteen suspected participants on the confession of one of the original seventeen. Meeting, however, with the usual Mexican delays in bringing the men to justice, he requested his Government to send a war-ship to Vera Cruz; and within a few days thereafter procured from the Mexican Government an agreement to pay one hundred thousand marks indemnity.

Two days before the arrival of the warship Bremen it was announced that all fifteen of the culprits had tunneled out of jail at Puebla. Von Hinze at once went to Puebla and satisfied himself that the men had walked out of the front door of the jail. Thereupon he returned to the City of Mexico, informed the Minister of Finance of his discoveries, and told him he had orders from the Kaiser to secure immediate payment of the indemnity agreed upon, and that if it were not paid without delay the Bremen would seize the Vera Cruz custom-house and collect from the port income the one hundred thousand marks plus the expenses of the voyage thither.

The Admiral went out of the office of the Minister of Finance with the one hundred thousand marks in his hand. A few days later five of the escaped men were captured, two being executed at once. And among the first acts of Huerta when he usurped the reins of government was to shoot the remaining three.

Albert Hoskins, an American, was the doctor of the Monte del Real Mining Company at Pachuca, in the State of Hidalgo, and held also a first lieutenant's commission in the medical corps of the United States army.

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Mexican succeeded in eluding Nichols, who fired into the dark after him, and then continued on to town to report the escape. Destiny directed the bullet. The next day the Mexican was found dead not many yards from where Nichols had caught a last glimpse of him as he disappeared from view.

Nichols was arrested without opportunity to notify his family or Consul, held incommunicado, and treated with unwarranted harshness; in a word-an unpleasant word for which I apologize-he was confined in the common urinal of the jail. Those acquainted with the unsanitary conditions prevalent in Mexico will realize the misery and the danger of such a cell.

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The American Consul, when he became aware of Nichols's plight, was unable, through official representations to the local authorities, to ease the milkman's situation. Meantime, while representations continued making, the natural happened; the prisoner fell ill of fever contracted in the noisome hole in which his Government permitted him to remain.

And now the Consul sought to have the very sick man removed to a hospital, and, denied such permission at Tampico, brought the matter to the attention of the American Ambassador, Henry Lane Wilson, at Mexico City.

Whatever errors Mr. Wilson may have subsequently committed, indifference to the unjust treatment of his fellow-countrymen was never among them. At once he took up the case with the Governor of Tamaulipas, and, failing to obtain from that worthy the authority to have Nichols transferred to a hospital, went direct to President Madero, to whom he vigorously presented a statement of the cruelty and injustice to which the man was subjected. But Madero was as indifferent as his Governor.

At this stage in the endeavor to get a square deal for his compatriot, Mr. Wilson, revealing intimate knowledge of the Mexican character, asked his Government for a war-ship, and the Chester was ordered to Tampico. With the Chester in port, the Ambassador again waited upon Madero and demanded that Nichols be removed to a hospital. And Nichols was forthwith removed to a hospital, and, when luckily he had recovered, given the fair trial to which he was entitled.

This was Francisco I. Madero, the same Madero in whose favor the United States had

permitted gross and frequent violation of our neutrality laws when he rebelled against the Diaz Government; the same Madero whom the United States had again favored by preventing arms to get across the border to Orozco, thus killing the effort of that redhanded leader to unseat his chief.

In the second week or thereabouts of last December (1914) two Englishmen were set upon and murdered by some Mexicans at their mine near Nacozari, in the northern part of the State of Sonora.

The case was taken up instantly and vigorously by England through its Consul at Douglas, Arizona, the nearest post of a British representative, and within two weeks two of the murderers had been arrested by the Mexican authorities and shot.

In northern Chihuahua last November (1914) three Americans were waylaid by a party of so-called Mexican "bandits," shot, then tied to horses, and dragged until dead, as their recovered mutilated bodies showed only too clearly.

As I say, the mutilated bodies, piteously eloquent of the atrocity, have been recovered; but official United States action thus far is described by the announcement from Washington that "the case has been reported to the State Department."

During almost the entire period between January, 1914, and the middle of the succeeding May, while the Constitutionalists struggled to capture the port of Tampico from the Federals, roving bands and guerrilla warfare infested the entire region thereabout, endangering American life and millions of dollars of American and English oil property.

The Americans appealed to their Government to warn the Mexicans of this hazard to foreign life and property, urging that the actual oil-fields be declared a neutral zone, for the good and sufficient reasons: (1) that they were from ten to fifty and more miles from the city and port where the rival armies were in veritable contact; (2) that the storage tanks, so easily destroyed, alone represented hundreds of thousands of dollars; and (3) that the firing of a well by one of the many badly directed shrapnel shells would accomplish its complete ruin.

It was a vain appeal. The indecisive skirmishing went on; swirled and zigzagged whither it listed, undiminished, unrestrained;

and when at length the Federals walked out and General Pablo Gonzales and his Constitutionalists walked in and the city was officially "taken," the foreigners reckoned their losses to a very considerable sum in cattle, horses, warehouses, and oil.

About a year later, or, to be exact, in midJanuary, 1915, Venustiano Carranza, with his "headquarters" at Vera Cruz and his office in the lighthouse at the open seaway-pursuing to the last the plundering, obstructionist habit he has made so familiar and so notorious since his first coming to Mexico City in the summer of 1914-put an embargo on the oil exports of an American and of a British owned company, because they refused to pay his extortionate tax, and threatened, in addition, to confiscate the plant of the latter.

The British Ambassador at Washington at once "made urgent representations to the State Department," and the next day Secretary Bryan announced through the press that the United States Government had notified Carranza that "serious consequences may follow his threatened action against foreign-owned oil plants at Tampico. And the oil companies forthwith proceeded to do business.

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Now, the purpose of this distressing and wholly unprejudiced recital-taken from a full note-book of such things-is by no means only to lift into view the obstacles put in the way of legitimate business in Mexico, or to uncover the horrors, of which there have been a sickening many, that have fallen upon foreign men and women in that country, but to illustrate the difference in attitude towards their nationals by Great Britain, Germany, and the United States, the practical results of their respective methods, and the influence of those respective methods upon native regard for and conduct towards the respective nationals of the said great Powers.

And it is the last-viz., the rôle a country plays in establishing a respected status for its nationals-that I wish especially to emphasize as most germane to the situation in which Americans now living in Mexico find themselves, and the one which not only explains much of what has happened to our countrymen and countrywomen in Mexico, but also accounts for the new and contemptuous pose of Mexico towards the United States.

The practical result of England's wellknown consideration for her subjects abroad invites respect for the Briton wherever he

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