The determination of the Mexican Government to expropriate American and British oil undertakings in Mexico is another, and probably final step in the long struggle which has been waged between the Government and the oil interests. Labour in Mexico has very definite ideas on the subject of what it should be paid, and aided by a communistically inclined Government has been agitating for all sorts of improvements in its lot. A representative of this journal who visited Tampico the year before last obtained much interesting information as to how, even then, the hand of the Mexican Government was falling heavily upon the foreign oil interests. The peculiarity of the workers' ideas can best be evidenced by one of the demands which they had put forward during a strike some months earlier. Among other things the workers of one oil company demanded that the employers should supply them with a field and ponies for the purpose of playing polo. Needless to say that request was not granted in the ultimate settlement, but it is indicative of the strangeness of the men's ideas that such a demand should ever have been made. But conditions had been singular for some time before that. Employers of labour had very little to say on the subject of who they would or, would not employ. That was a matter entirely in the hands of Labour organizations. Should say, a foreman leave his job, the next man to him would move into his place, and everyone below him would move up one, while one fine morning the employer would see a new face on the premises, and on enquiry would be told that that was the person chosen to fill the vacancy which had thus been created. So the expropriation of the oil properties need come as no surprise. It is true that Mexican law does provide for the compensation of the owning companies within a period of ten years, but Mexico is at present so poor that, though President Cardenas has succeeded in' splitting up large estates into small holdings, he is without suffcient funds to advance the peons credit for stock, farm equipment or even seeds.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.