Armenia and Mexico

(The Crimson invites all men in the University to submit signed communications of timely interest. It assumes no responsibility, however, for sentiments expressed under this head and reserves the right to exclude any whose publication would be palpably inappropriate.)

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:--

Your editorial of June 2 on Mexico is one which I cannot let go by without some comment. Six years ago, on the 29th of June, 1914, the world, and our country with it, howled its disapproval and disgust at Austria for insisting on sending Austrian police "to apprehend the black murderers" of the Crown Prince. Today, you, acting in conjunction with many others who, I fear, have had very little dealings, directly or otherwise, with Mexicans or with any of the Americans murdered in Mexico, conscientiously and sincerely, but none the loss erroneously, advocate and applaud our doing to Mexico what in 1914 was called, and rightly so, high-handedness and jingoism.

You close very appropriately with the admonition that our honor, etc., demand that we "aid in setting the Mexican house in order and keeping it in order." Do you, or does any other American, think that Mexico will submit to a mandate or any other kind of protectorate without resistance? Then you do indeed know the Mexicans but little, for that matter, no country, with any self-respect will. Even as little a nation as Nicaragua didn't accept a mandate without bloodshed and protests. How can Mexico? You tell us that "war may be an amusing national industry, but it is rarely a profitable or a healthy one.' And then you propose to send us headlong into a Mexican and thus into a Pan-American war?

I am not a Mexican, and if the United States gets into another war, I shall be willing and proud to wear our country's uniform once more. But I see no reason why we should institute a policy of jingoism when we have just been commemorating, with sadness, the death of 360 Harvard men who died fighting jingoism in Germany. Let us help, by all means, for that is the true mission of him who can; but let us not, in order to help a needy neighbor clean house, appropriate his dwelling for the use of our rent profiteers.

Any aid that is to be permanent or of any value at all must not go beyond the point of aid, cheerfully given and willingly accepted by him who needs it. The Fall resolution is a pernicious piece of jingoism, concocted by a self-styled defender of American honor, which proposes that we go to war with the rest of the American continent to atone for the deaths and insults to such men as our consular agent Jenkins and others, whose conduct has been such that, were they here, they would be where many of our unscrupulous profiteers and despoilers will be in the near future. I do not defend the murders of those Americans who were foully and in cold blood assassinated by bandits; but, from personal observation where conditions are not far different, I must admit that the greater part of those crimes do not come out of the diseased mind of born murderers. Many of them have what we here consider a just provocation, or should so consider were a citizen of a stronger nation conducting himself toward us as many of our citizens conduct themselves toward Mexico and the Mexicans, who are, after all, the rightful owners of their country.

To be effective, any aid from us must not and can not be undertaken singly, nor with the machine gun all set up to shoot. We must invite, for the sake of peace which is costing so dear, all the other American nations. Give the A-B-C countries equal representation with our own on a board of investigation and recommendation; and give the others some representation. Say a board of two Americans, two members each from the A-B-C republics, and one from each of the others. Let their findings and recommendation guide us. And above all, let us secure the cooperation and good will of Latin America entire before we assume any protectorates where they are not wanted, nor, I may add, really needed. HECTOR LAZO '21.