something odd about the man. At last, as was inevitable, I suppose, he began to talk about the Chinese. Mrs. Wingrove said the same things about them that I had already heard so many missionaries say. They were a lying people, untrustworthy, cruel, and dirty; but a faint light was visible in the east. Though the results of missionary endeavor were not very noteworthy as yet, the future was promising. They They no longer believed in their old gods, and the power of the literati was broken. It is an attitude of mistrust and dislike tempered by optimism. But Mr. Wingrove mitigated his wife's strictures. He dwelt on the good nature of the Chinese, on their devotion to their parents and their love for their children. "Mr. Wingrove won't hear a word against the Chinese," said his wife; "he simply loves them." "I think they have great qualities," he said. "You can't walk through those crowded streets of theirs without having that impressed on you." "I don't believe Mr. Wingrove notices the smells." His wife laughed. At that moment there was a knock at the door, and a young woman came in. She had the long skirts and the unbound feet of the native Christian, and on her face a look that was at once cringing and sullen. She said something to Mrs. Wingrove. I happened to catch sight of Mr. Wingrove's face. When he saw her there passed over it an expression of the most intense physical repulsion. It was distorted as though by an odor that nauseated him, and then immediately the look vanished, and his lips twitched to a pleasant smile; but the effort was too great, and he showed only a tortured grimace. I looked at him with amaze ment. Mrs. Wingrove, with an "Excuse me," got up and left the room. "That is one of our teachers," said Mr. Wingrove in that same set voice which had puzzled me before. "She's invaluable. I put infinite reliance on her. She has a very fine character.” Then, I hardly know why, in a flash I saw the truth; I saw the disgust in his soul for all that his will loved. I was filled with the excitement which an explorer may feel when, after an arduous journey, he comes upon a country with features new and unexpected. Those tortured eyes explained themselves, the unnatural voice, the measured restraint with which he praised, that air he had of a hunted man. Notwithstanding all he said, he hated the Chinese with a hatred beside which his wife's distaste was insignificant. When he walked through the teeming streets of the city, it was an agony to him; his missionary life revolted him; his soul was like the raw shoulders of the coolies, and the carrying-pole burned the bleeding wound. He would not go home because he could not bear to see again what he cared for so much; he would not read his books because they reminded him of the life he loved so passionately; and perhaps he had married that vulgar wife in order to cut himself off more resolutely from a world that his every instinct craved. He martyred his tortured soul with a passionate exasperation. I tried to see how the call had come. I think that for years he had been completely happy in his easy ways at Oxford, and he had loved his work, with its pleasant companionship, his books, his holidays in France and Italy. He was a contented man and asked nothing better than to spend the rest of his days in just such a fashion; but I know not what obscure feeling had gradually taken hold of him that his life was too lazy, too contented. I think he was always a religious man, and perhaps some early belief, instilled into him in childhood and long forgotten, of a jealous God who hated his creatures to be happy on earth, rankled in the depths of his heart; I think, because he was so well satisfied with his life, he began to think it was sinful. A restless anxiety seized him. Whatever he thought with his intelligence, his instincts began to tremble with the dread of eternal punishment. I do not know what put the idea of China into his head, but at first he must have thrust it aside with violent repulsion; and perhaps the very violence of his repulsion impressed the idea on him, for he found it haunting him. I think he said that he would not go, but I think he felt that he would have to. God was pursuing him, and wherever he hid himself, God followed. With his reason he struggled, but with his heart he was caught. He could not help himself. At last he gave in. I knew I should never see him again, and I had not the time to wait before a reasonable familiarity would permit me to talk of more intimate matters. "Tell me," I said, "do you believe God will condemn the Chinese to eternal punishment if they don't accept Christianity?" I am sure my question was crude and tactless, for the old man in him tightened his lips. But he answered. "The whole teaching of the gospel forces one to that conclusion. There is not a single argument that people have adduced to the contrary which has the force of the plain words of Jesus Christ." New Peons for Old A Decade of Revolution in Mexico By FRAZIER HUNT Drawings by HOWARD W. WILlard ALMOST missed finding the real I story of Mexico. For days and weeks I talked with Mexican officials and American business men and Tampico's oil managers and the run of the Mexico City clubs in general. They told me a score and one stories: the present Government of Mexico was a dangerous, fiery red, as red as Moscow and twice as dangerous; Mexico was on the highroad to happiness and prosperity; nothing could save Mexico but for the United States to take over the country; the oil-wells of Tampico were growing salty, and in a few years more would be useless, and thus the Mexican problem would be settled for good and all; the peons were in worse condition than ever before; Obregon was the greatest man in the world; Obregon was a one-armed villain. I listened respectfully, and then went on my way and looked further. I knew that somewhere there was a real Mexican story, but it was as elusive as all truth is. Then one day I bumped straight into it. It was in the corridor of the Regis Hotel in Mexico City. A little grayhaired lady who has seen more plain hell than Foch, and dreamed more dreams than H. G. Wells, guided me into my story. Her name was Mother Jones, and it's a right name: she mothers half the world-the lower half. She led me straight to a man in "store clothes" and a flannel shirt. His face was lined with deep sun wrinkles, and his eyes were gentle and smiling. He had worked in mines in Arizona in his younger days and he could stumble along with English. "Here's one of my boys," she said, petting the miner's arm as she spoke. "If you want something about Mexico, he 'll give it to you." I led him up to my room and seated him in the one big chair. "You 're a miner," I began. "Si, but mine in Sonora he shut down, and work finished. For five, six months no work. Miners no got dollars; niñas hungry, womans crying. So I say, 'I go Ciudad Mexico, see General Calles, and he give us farm for work. Last week I come here and see mi general. He take me in his automobile to Secretario Villareal, and he say: 'Sure; we give you miners land. You mus' work or starve. You work for yourself. We give you big farm, you make small farms, and you miners go work on own farms.' My friend sat back in his chair and lit a fresh cigarette. It was simple: men unemployed and hungry; well, put them to work on idle lands. Like the Russian proletariat, ninety per cent. of them had come from the farms; so they could go back to the farms now. The Government would sell them machinery and animals at cost and see them through to the time of the first crop. They could pay back in small payments through a period of years. Land that most of them had been dreaming of for half a dozen generations would be their own; they would become economically independent; they would become good citizens; they would want their children to go to school; they would want a voice in the affairs of their Government. Mexican, I started out to see the high officials of the Government. I had seen most of them before, but now I was to talk to them freely and honestly as fellow-men, not as politicians and statesmen. Several days later, when we had finished the rounds, I took a train for the northwest and Villa and the great bandit colonies; then slowly I worked my way to the border and to the States. Thus it was that I found the real story of these ten tremendous years of war and revolution. It meant a good deal to me, because I had a background of an old Mexico that distinctly was not concerned with miners and peons; And this in Mexico, the land of that, instead, was loaded down with revolution and civil war and the mañana habit; worthless, drunken, vicious, ignorant, brutal Mexico! The following day, in the tow of a fine, liberal, state-educated young the weight of foreign interference, alien exploitation, and neglect of common millions. In the glorious swash-buckling days of the empire I had gone to Mexico, and for three years had driven men and cattle alike on a sugar plantation. Fifty miles below me there were plantations where real peonage was practised, and a hundred miles away the Villa National, where men were lured, chained in gangs, slept in barb-wired and guarded corrals, and worked in steaming tobacco-fields until death broke their false contracts for them. Still farther down, in Yucatan, brave Yaqui Indians, with the hearts of lions, brought down in prison trains from the hills of Sonora, were beaten, worked, and killed in the henequen-plantations. In those days I thought Diaz one of the great men of the world, wise, just, brave, the savior and maker of his country. Then the revolution flared up, and one day my hero Diaz slipped out of Mexico City, and foolish, stupid Madero rode into power. The grizzled, unwashed men who rode with him were to me bandits, trouble-makers, the riffraff, the scourings of the country. If Madero was sincere, he was the one upright man among a hundred thousand scoundrels. Then the revolution and unrest hit my part of the country, and I left between suns, hating Madero and his revolution and his revolutionists, and bringing out with me the story of a stupid Madero and his brutal bandits riding their stolen horses behind a banner of false revolution. That was ten years ago. Now I have again come out from adventuring in Mexico, but this time there is another story that I have to tell. Down in a little village in the State of Vera Cruz there is a public plaza that ten years ago had two circular promenade-walks, one for the gentry in shoes and rebozos, and the other for the peons in blankets and sandals. To-day the peons' walk is overgrown with grass and weeds, and on colorful tropical nights the whole village strolls where only the high and royal dared tread a decade ago. That, for me at least, is a part of the real story of Mexico. It is the story of human beings dreaming and fighting and struggling for elusive bits of freedom and self-respect for things they cannot pronounce, but things out of which they unconsciously know they have been cheated. Mexico's revolution is only one quarter won. There is education to be gained, economic freedom to be secured, real political expression to be voiced. The revolution may be over, and the evolution now under way. From a constructive point of view the French Revolution failed because for hundreds of years the common people had absolutely no experience in local or national self-government, no training in coöperative and voluntary unions. The success of the Russian Revolution was brought about not only because of the thrilling moving |