The Star. MONDAY, JANUARY 17, 1926. WILL AMERICA FIGHT MEXICO?

Star (Christchurch), Issue 18056, 17 January 1927, Page 6

The Star. MONDAY, JANUARY 17, 1926. WILL AMERICA FIGHT MEXICO?

Many officials in Washington consider that ■war between Mexico and the United States over the Nicaraguan trouble is inevitable. So runs a cablegram, which goes on lo tell of the American occupation of every town of importance on the Nicaraguan coast—an occupation that will be continued until the revolution against the regime of General Diaz is crushed. Mexico is interested in this problem because she is ambitious to secure Central American leadership, and to swing 1 lip five republics of the Panama Canal zone out of the orbit of the United States and into her own circle of influence. The United States, on the other hand, is equally determined to dominate in Central America. Mexico, well informed writers stale, has no economic or territorial ambitions in Central America, hut is drawn by racial affinity and a certain fear af a “ Yankee peril ” which threatens her own territorial connections. Mr Carlton Beals, a student of Mexico, declares that that country’s new interest in Pan Latin Americanism is an outgrowth of the revolutionary epoch from which she lias just emerged, but she feels herself ringed about by the American advance on the Panama Canal, in the establishment of an American naval base in the Culf of Fonseca, and in the various occupations of Nicaragua by United Slates marines. This advance has resulted in a vast territorial arc, controlled by the United States, stretching from the Florida Keys lo Panama, which seals up the Culf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea. Mexico, ever since the fall of Diaz, has been fighting economic and political domination by the United States. If Central America is cut away, her position will become quite insupportable. She feels, he says, the acute necessity of maintaining intact from American control the five republics of the South which link her up territorially to the rest of Latin America. If she can arouse in them a permanent feeling of dependence upon her cultural leadership, and a spirit of steady opposition to American economic penetration and political pressure, tier own international position will he strengthened. Mr Beals declares that, diplomatically and morally, the United Stales has been outmanoeuvred by Mexico in Central America, and in a warning that history is not written in a decade or even a century, lie writes: “The Mexican activities are a part of a general Latin American united front tendency, part of the age-long will of men and nations to be free. Mexico is marching on the Canal with music, banners and flowers. Wc arc marching with dollars, machine-guns and marines.”

Interest in the anti-evolution campaign in America died out with the Scopes trial, which suggested that the antievolutionists had been laughed out of court, but it is revived to-day in a cablegram to tlie effect that the Tennessee Supreme Court has upheld the constitutionality of the antievolution law. It is likely that a good many cablegrams will be received from time to time regarding lest cases in the various State courts, because a big campaign was to be launched in 1927 by what arc called the “ fundamentalists.” Briefly, the anti-evolution law in America, which was first passed in March, 1925, in the State of Tennessee, designates as a criminal offence the advocacy in public schools and colleges of “ any theory that denies the story of the Divine creation of man as taught by the Bible, and teaches instead that,man descended from a lower form of animal.” The “ Bible Crusaders,” “ fundamentalists,” “ Bryan leaguers ” and anti-evolutionists generally, are strongly entrenched in the South, and one writer recently predicted that the whole country in time would be divided by a deep and abiding schism, with New York as the capital for the modernists and Florida as the headquarters of the fundamentalists. Actually, the anti-evolutionists are laying their plans carefully for the Presidential election in two years’ time. It is all very amusing lo people outside America, Fortunately, British communities arc less hysterical about matters ol this description. Perhaps it is because they have a fundamental belief that “Truth is mighty and will prevail.”