he asked me to write out what I understood was the gist of what he had said and send it to him. I did this a few hours after the interview, writing the statement in English. Mr. Osuna translated the statement for Mr. Aguilar and brought me word that I had understood the interview correctly. But he later told me that Aguilar's, eleventh-hour hope was that I would not use much of the interview until after election.' As the interview was a matter of news, I had on this point to exercise my own judgment.

"General Carranza, by the way, was very friendly and promised to send me unpublished copies of telegraphic correspondence which had passed between himself and Henry Lane Wilson in the early days of the Carranza revolution. These have not yet arrived, however, and I doubt if they ever will reach me. General Carranza seemed anxious to meet all my questions fully, and at the end of the interview suggested that if any further questions occurred to me I should send them to

him in a letter. This was at two o'clock on the afterooon of October 18, and I was to leave for home that evening. I did not have time to write a letter, but I happened to have in my pocket a copy of the questionnaire which I had submitted to General Gonzales. Mr. Osuna offered to translate this, take it to the First Chief, and bring back his replies; but this would have necessitated my remaining in Mexico another day, and probably missing the issue of The Outlook for November 1, and, as I had already covered in my conversation with Carranza most of the questions which I had put to Gonzales, I decided not to wait.

"GREGORY MASON."

As Mr. Mason's articles were planned solely with a view to obtain accurate information necessary for an enlightened public opinion concerning Mexico, and as this is as necessary now as ever, we commend to our readers' attention Mr. Mason's second article, "Carranza: Will His Government Last?"

AN Carranza keep the lid on?"

"Are things in Mexico really as

Abad as they're painted?"

Such questions are thrown at an outcoming traveler from Mexico as soon as he has concluded the fumigation rites at the American quarantine station on the border. Similar

queries are put to him by traveling companions on the journey from Laredo to New York, where the questioning is continued by every one the home-comer meets, until he begins to feel that, with all its tribulations, life in Mexico is less trying than talking about it at home.

But such questions as the above represent about the limits of the average American's interest in Mexico. Special students or those whose material welfare is particularly affected by some special phase of Mexico may ask you questions about the Church or about mining or about cattle or about archæology, but the interest of the average American is pretty well covered by that question, "Can Carranza keep the lid on ?"

For the average citizen of this country is interested in Mexico only when the fortunes of that country impinge on the welfare of this. And so long as Carranza or Villa or Madero or Huerta or Diaz or some one can

keep the lid on," the average man and woman in the United States is well enough

So to the answering of that question this article is directed. But the task is not an easy one, for this reason:

Probably no country to-day, unless it be China, resists so stubbornly as Mexico the efforts of the investigator to get at the truth. Those who know Mexico best are first to admit that they know it little. The truth about it cannot be better expressed than by the use of the well-known "bromide" that "Mexico is a country of contradictions." Most students of Mexico have read-and those who have not done so should read"Viva Mexico," by Charles Macomb Flandrau. Those who have read it will remember (Continued on page following illustrations)