Later
We hear that Mr. Lind is having parleyings with the Zapatistas! If he is going to dream this dream and pass it on to his friends in Washington, they will all have the most awful nightmare ever visited on dreamers. Zapata has been the terror of every President—Diaz, de la Barra, Madero, and Huerta—for nearly five years. His crimes and depredations are committed under the banner of “Land for the People,” and there has been a certain consistency about his proceedings, always “agin the government”; but that he has, after these years of bloodshed, rapine, and loot, rendered conditions more tolerable for any except the rapers and looters, is most debatable. I once saw some living remains brought to the Red Cross after one of his acts at Tres Marias, about fifty kilometers from here. A train was attacked, looted, oil was poured on the passengers, and the train was set on fire. The doctors who went to the station to get the remains out of the train say the sight was unforgetable. The name Zapata has now become a symbol of brigandage, and many operate under it. No general sent into Morelos has ever brought order. For instance, one was sent to Michoacan with two thousand cavalry, to put down a small force of several hundred brigands; though he had the grazing free, he charged the government 50 centavos per horse! It became a vicious, but profitable, circle, as you can well see.
There has been a great break in exchange. The peso, which was two to one when we first came to Mexico, and lately has been three to one, or nearly that, broke Saturday, and went to four and a half to the gold dollar. Various explanations. Huerta has been threatening to found a bank of his own if the bankers did not do something for him. Some say that the bankers brought on the break in exchange to scare him, and others that Huerta proposed establishing a bank of his own to scare them! Anyway, exchange broke. During his conversation with the bankers, apropos of the loans they were loath to give him, Huerta is said to have jocularly remarked that there were trees enough in Chapultepec Park to hang them all on without crowding. Those old cypresses have witnessed a good deal, but a consignment of indigenous and foreign bankers hanging with the long, gray moss from their branches would have savored of novelty.
A gusty day on this usually wind-still plateau. The pale yellow streamers of the banana-tree are torn to tatters, but one must forgive an occasional vagary in this climate, unsurpassed in its steady beauty, and which has the further recommendation that one can count on wearing one’s winter clothes in summer, and one’s summer clothes in winter....
Disorder here has been most prejudicial to French interests. Since Maximilian’s time, especially, they have had the habit of investments in Mexico. Now billions of francs are unproductive. It will be a fine bill poor old Uncle Sam will get from la belle France!