The absence of diplomatic relations between Mexico and Great Britain may have encouraged Mr. Waugh to greater freedom of speech than any American author with similar views on Mexico has so far found it practical to employ. It the United States the Good Neighbor Policy appears inadvertently to have operated in favor of the literary supporters of the Cardenas administration. Mr. Waugh's conservatism is a philosophy in itself, as broad as the British empire and apparently quite free from petty partisan considerations. Mexico, as Mr. Waugh sees her, is a country that has been progressively and persistently ruining herself, with only a few breathing spells, ever since 1810. Instead of moving forward, as the United States has done in the past century, Mr. Waugh finds that Mexico has actually declined culturally and economically from the position she enjoyed around 1800.
Litigation is so constant a feature in Mexican life that initiative is throttled.
In short, it appears to him the people have sacrificed their social and political liberties without receiving any returns in the shape of internal security or prestige abroad. An alarming note, to be sure, but one whose implications no thoughtful person may be quite prepared to ignore nowadays. Almost every unhappy figure from Iturbide to Cardenas who has appeared as a leader of the country has spoken in the phrases of contemporary advanced thought. And the trade routes for its importation are already established. Stripped of all phrases what is happening in Mexico now is not, he believes, particularly new.