6.30
Callers all the afternoon. Now McKenna comes in to say that the final word, en clair, from Washington has been received. It was given out at the White House at noon. “General Huerta is still insisting upon doing something less than has been demanded, and something less than could constitute an acknowledgment that his representatives were entirely in the wrong in the indignities they have put upon the United States. The President has determined that if General Huerta has not yielded by six o’clock on Sunday afternoon, he will take the matter to Congress on Monday.”
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It makes me sick with dread to think of the probable fate of Americans in the desert spaces and the mountain fastnesses of Mexico. Some one has blundered, somewhere, somehow, that we should come in to give the coup de grâce to this distracted nation, who yet clings, and rightly, to those tattered shreds of sovereignty we have left her. The foreign Powers think we are playing the most cold-blooded, most cruel game of “grab” in all history.