2.30 A.M.
I can’t sleep. National and personal potentialities are surging through my brain. Three stalwart railroad men came to the Embassy this evening. They brought reports of a plan for the massacre of Americans in the street to-night, but, strange and wonderful thing, a heavy rain is falling. It is my only experience of a midnight rain in Mexico, except that which fell upon the mobs crying “Death to Diaz,” nearly three years ago. As all Mexicans hate to get wet, rain is as potent as shell-fire in clearing the streets, and I don’t think there will be any trouble. Providence seems to keep an occasional unnatural shower on hand for Mexican crises.
N.’s secret-service man reappeared upon the scene yesterday, probably by the President’s orders. This works two ways. It protects N., and incidentally proves to Huerta that N. is not intriguing against him.
Had this war been induced by a great incident or for a great principle, I could bear it. But because the details of a salute could not be decided upon we give ourselves, and inflict on others, the horrors of war. Mr. Bryan, so the Herald playfully remarks to-day, must have been surprised and disappointed. The “salutes were always so cheerfully returned at Chautauqua.” It is no situation for amateurs. The longer I live the more respect I have for technical training. Every Foreign Office in Europe or any other continent keeps experts for just such cases. I may become an interventionist, but after Huerta. He has proved himself vastly superior, in executive ability, to any man Mexico has produced since Diaz, in spite of his lack of balance and his surprising childishness, following upon strange subtleties, and he would have sold his soul to please the United States to the point of recognition. In that small, soft hand (doubtless bloody, too) were possibilities of a renewal of prosperity, after the dreams of Madero that he himself could never have clothed in reality. The reassociation of the government with the conservative elements might have given some guarantee of peace, at least during Huerta’s life, and any man’s life is a long time in an Indian or Latin republic.