Last Year's Decree

To bite the hand of President Roosevelt, whose Treasury silver purchases from Mexico have alone saved the peso from collapse, was the scarcely brilliant move made last week by President Lazaro Cardenas. Well knowing that Mr. Roosevelt wants lower tariffs all around, that they are the thing dearest to Secretary of State Cordell Hull, President Cardenas blandly raised tariffs on most things Mexico buys from the U. S. by 100 to 200%. On some items he upped them 400%.

Neutral observers in Mexico City judged that President Cardenas and his associates have only just realized what economists have known for months: that his agrarian decrees of the past year have had many disastrous results. Total production of such Mexican staple crops as wheat, corn and cocoa has shrunk sharply partly due to drought, partly to inefficient working of lands divided and parceled out among the peons.

The cost of living has been rising in Mexico so fast that recently the Department of Economy stopped publishing price indices. Mexicans with money have continued, however, to buy the U. S. razor blades, radios and motor cars.

To Humanitarian President Cardenas it was clear last week that Mexico will have much more money to spend on his own New Deal if it spends less money abroad. Because Cardenas not long ago promised that he would make no further use of his extraordinary powers after Jan. 1, 1938, his drastic tariff decree was carefully dated Dec. 31, 1937.

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