File No. 812.00/12846.
The Secretary of State to Vice Consul Silliman.
Washington, July 31, 1914.
My telegram of July 23d, 5 p.m., was not meant to imply any lack of confidence in the First Chief or in any of the leaders of the Constitutionalist cause, but we deem it imperatively necessary as an act of friendship to apprize General Carranza and his associates, now rather than later, when it might be too late to serve them, of the circumstances upon which we know their success to depend. [Page 577] Excesses of any kind, even towards their own people, and especially extreme measures against political opponents or representatives of the Church, if such things should occur in connection with their assumption of power at Mexico City, might make it morally impossible for the United States to recognize a new government. If we did not recognize, it could obtain no loans and must speedily break down. The existence of war in Europe would clearly make it impossible to obtain assistance anywhere on the other side of the water even if such excesses as we have alluded to did not themselves make it impossible; and such excesses would be quite as certain to alienate sympathy in Europe as they would be to alienate sympathy in the United States. After the new Government is established, it can adopt such deliberate and well and fully considered policies towards its own people and its own domestic institutions as it deems best and can successfully and temperately work out the solution; but vindictive and harsh measures adopted at the outset and carried info effect by military force and authority are quite a different matter, and might have the most far-reaching and disastrous results. This Government would not be dealing frankly with General Carranza and his associates if it did not state these facts very plainly now before it is too late; and it cannot state them too plainly. The success or failure of the Constitutionalist cause is to be determined now, at the outset. It is to be judged by what it does now in connection with the transfer of full power. Our advice offered, and everything stated in our telegram of the 23d, cannot be modified nor can we recede from it in the least without deep and perhaps fatal consequences to the cause of the present revolution which, if that advice is accepted in the spirit in which it is given, may now be made completely and gloriously successful. This Government is reluctant to contemplate the possible consequences to Mexico if it should be forced to withhold recognition from those who are now to succeed General Huerta. It is our plain duty as friends, therefore, to reiterate with deep earnestness all that we have said. Our recent messages have been most deliberately conceived, with a full consciousness of all they implied, and were sent with a very suggestive feeling of our responsibility to Mexico, to ourselves and to the world.
Bring the foregoing to the attention of General Carranza.