BarbarousMexico JOHN KENNETH TURNER

THE DIAZAMERICAN PRESS CONSPIRCY 243
As to the first statement, I have answered it in the
chapter, "Four Mexican Strikes." Three of these strikes
are famous and there is no excuse for Mr. Stevens'
having heard of none of them. As to the second statement,
there are some hundreds of Americans who arc
just now fervently wishing it were really true—fervently
wishing that they could get a settlement on the
basis of twenty-five cents on the dollar. In February,
1910, about the time Mr. Stevens was penning so glowingly,
the United States Bank of Mexico. the largest
bank in the country which catered to Americans, was
wrecked in exactly the same way as most American bank
wrecks are made—by misappropriation of funds to support
a speculative scheme. The bank vent to smash,
the president vent to jail, the depositors did not get
their money and at this writing there seems little chance
of their getting any of it. Certainly they will never get
all or half of it. And this was not the onl y disaster of
the sort that has lately occurred in Mexico. About May
1, 1910, another American bank, the Federal Banking
Company, went to smash and its cashier, Robert E.
Crump, went to jail. The fact is that there was no
ground for Mr. Stevens' statement whatsoever.
To quote all of Mr. Stevens' blunders would he to
quote most of his three articles. He went to Mexico
to prepare a defense of Diaz and he did not take the
trouble to put a liberal sprinkling of facts in his defense.
He was taken in charge by agents of Diaz and
he wrote down what they told him to write. He was
even taken in on the little yarn about the Yucatan slave
who got his master into jail, a yarn which had done duty
before. The story runs that a lirnequen. king beat one of
his laborers, the laborer appealed to a justice of the
peace, who arrested and lined the master. The truth