The Bogey Of Intervention.

New York Times 100 years ago today, September 30, 1912:
    The sub-committee of the Senate appointed to investigate our relations with Mexico have discovered a mare's nest. Large quantities of arms, they find, were shipped across the border into Mexico while the Madero revolution was in progress. This traffic was afterward stopped. The committee declare that if Orozco's forces could have been supplied with arms and ammunition as Madero's were, Orozco would have triumphed long ago. This is doubtful. The triumph of Madero was not primarily due to the equipment of his forces; he won few battles, and none of great consequence. His revolution was successful because it had the moral support of a majority of the Mexican people.
    The unrestricted passage of the munitions of war across the border was, indeed, a great scandal during the Madero rebellion. There had been no revolution in Mexico for thirty years. Our border was practically unguarded. But President Taft somewhat tardily awoke to the danger of the situation. He ordered troops to Texas and Arizona to guard the border and enforce the neutrality laws. For this wise action he was roundly abused by some of the very persons, as we believe, who are now endeavoring to promote trouble between the United States and Mexico. He was accused of undue sympathy with the Diaz Government, and of endeavoring to support it against Madero's uprising. There was not a word of truth in this accusation, and there is not a word of truth in the present charge to the opposite effect, namely, that the United States favored the rebellion of Madero and has been hostile to Orozco. The Government at Washington has been neutral from the very beginning of the troubles in Mexico. That money may have been surreptitiously contributed to the Madero cause by individual American citizens anxious to gain the leader's good will for purposes best known to themselves is not unlikely. Neither the money nor the arms were of material benefit to Madero. As for sympathy, Americans with large interests in the industries of Mexico were strongly in favor of President Diaz, and hoped that he would suppress the rebellion. But they could do nothing to help him, and he neither asked nor expected help from them.
    Madero's adherents insist now that Orozco has received pecuniary aid from the United States. Their assertion is as trustworthy as the charge that Americans helped Madero. There is no lack of meddlesome persons in the United States. Orozco's rebellion, however, has no chance of success. It has been reduced to petty guerrilla war-tare in Sonora and Chihuahua. As for the renewed assertions that the Government at Washington is considering intervention, they can be based only on a desire to injure President Taft's Administration.
    A popular Government has been instituted in Mexico, and it is supported by a majority of the citizens of the republic of all classes. Because of the abandonment of the measures for the suppression of lawlessness employed by Diaz there is more or less anarchy in some of the States. That conditions are not nearly so bad as has been reported we know from the authentic statements of residents and intelligent visitors to Mexico. Prof. Leo S. Rowe of the University of Pennsylvania, in an interview reported in The Sunday times, presents a coherent statement of present conditions in the sister republic. He shows that President Madero and his Government have a clear idea of the difficulties to be surmounted, of the industrial and agricultural problems to be solved, and that they are working bravely to restore order. They must have time. Intelligent Mexicans understand that the transformation cannot be accomplished in a day or a year. There are unhappily too many Mexicans who are temperamentally unfit for self-government, and have not yet benefited in any way by the free educational institutions established within the last thirty years. In spite, however, of the often-repeated estímate of 85 per cent of illiterates in the population, recent history shows that people of this sort constitute a small minority, who will be more easily controlled when the machinery of the Madero Government is in working order.
    Meanwhile the threat of intervention, constantly made in our Southwestern States, and echoed in some of the sensational papers, serves as a bogey to hamper enterprise and disturb the popular mind. The bogey should be laid. The policy of our Government in regard to Mexico should be firmly and clearly proclaimed.