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Show That Border Danger WE read in the good book that at one time a cloud, only the size of a man's hand arose, but it speedily developed and such a rain followed that it was but the younger brother of the original orig-inal great flood. The authorities in Washington must be on the alert in handling the difficulties down on the lower Rio Grande, or those Texans will take fire soon and cross the river, despite all the efforts to stop them. If a few more Americans Amer-icans are killed there by Mexican bandits, the small cloud in the west will soon cover the whole heavens, and before the skies are again clear there will be much fewer Mexican bandits. Had President Wilson spent two or three years in the west when he was a young man, he would long ago have seen this danger and acted accordingly, accord-ingly, but it seems impossible for him to ever learn anything about the real character of the men of Mexico, or to realize that there has been a feud between Texans and Mexicans ever since before the Mexican war, which feud has not been at all softened during all the long watches of three-score and fifteen years. Peace is a beautiful condition, but with some people and races the only way to preserve it is by fighting for it. When "Rough" Johnson was arraigned ar-raigned in a court in Nevada, charged with keeping keep-ing a disorderly house, he acted as his own attorney attor-ney and said: "Your honor, when I opened my house I explained to the best men of this town that it should be a quiet, orderly place, and, your honor, I am bound to keep my word; if I have to lick some ornery son of a gun every fifteen minutes." There is much meat in that argument. There comes times when a club is more effective than the reading of the Sermon on the Mount would be. The Texans know this and they know the men beyond the Rio Grande better than the president pres-ident of the United States does. Moreover, they are all primitive lawyers and practice under an international in-ternational code which permits no technicalities to interfere with the execution of justice as they understand it. The wanderer in the wild who is wakened by what he believes are the howls of a million solves and lies awake with his heart beating beat-ing tumultously, at dawn sees two or three attenuated at-tenuated coyotes skulking away. Had some swift, aggressive work been done by the United States when Madero was assassinated, there would have been peace in Mexico for the past eighteen jM months. H |