November 11th
We lunch at the German Legation to-day, with Mr. Lind. He hasn’t any clothes, but as he doesn’t work along those lines I suppose it doesn’t matter. There is no question of the tailor making this man.
A heavenly, transforming sun, for which I am giving thanks, shines in at my windows. I am going out to do some “junking” with Lady C. With exchange three for one, every now and then some one does unearth something for nothing. The Belgian minister, who has money and flair, makes the most astounding finds. He got for a song what seems to be an authentic enamel of Diane de Poitiers, in its original frame—a relic of the glories of the viceroys.
Something that developed in a conversation with Mr. Lind has been making me a bit thoughtful, and more than a little uneasy. He has the idea, perhaps the plan, of facilitating the rebel advance by raising the embargo, and I am afraid he will be recommending it to Washington. We had been sitting, talking, after dinner, shivering in the big room over a diminutive electric stove, when he first tentatively suggested such action. I exclaimed: “Oh, Mr. Lind! You can’t mean that! It would be opening a Pandora box of troubles here.” Seeing how aghast I was, he changed the subject. But I cannot get it out of my head. The Mexican book is rolled out like a scroll before him; can it be that he is not going to read it? Any measures tending to undermine the central authority here, imperfect though it be, can only bring calamity. I witnessed that at first hand in the disastrous overturning of the Diaz rule and the installation of the ineffective Madero régime. I think Madero was more surprised than any one that, after having taken so much trouble to help him in, we took so little to keep him in. The diplomats are forever insisting that Diaz’s situation in 1877 was analogous to Huerta’s now, and that after a decently permissible delay of ten months, or whatever it was, we recognized him. So why not Huerta? He, at least, is in possession of the very delicate machinery of Mexican government, and has shown some understanding of how to keep it going.