The admission of Alaska and Hawaii into the Union as states has once again raised the question of Puerto Rico's constitutional status. Many islanders see the present commonwealth, very nearly the personal creation of Governor Luis Muñoz Marín, as a way station on the road to full membership in the American federal system. Independence sentiment, barring economic catastrophe, seems safely relegated to the realm of polemical fantasy. Thus the island's only tangible constitutional problem is its relation to the United States: should it be associated with, or an integral part of the mainland. No event in Puerto Rican history has been more important in shaping the course of the island's development than the grant of collective United States citizenship in the Jones Act of 1917. And no Puerto Rican politician of the era was more influential than Luis Muñoz Rivera, who embodied the dominant Unionista party in the same way that his son embodies the now dominant Popular party. Muñoz Rivera's role in the politics of the Jones Bill affords a revealing view of the difficulties of working within the framework of colonialism, and of being forced to reconcile aspirations with political realities.

Economic activity on Mexico's Gulf coast steadily increased during the last two decades of the nineteenth century partially as a result of improved means of transportation and the enforced peace of Porfirio Díaz. The Mexican government modernized that area's communication facilities by letting out several highly profitable construction contracts to foreigners for building or improving harbor and port facilities at Tampico, Veracruz, Coatzacoalcos, and Campeche. Alien contractors and investors were responsible for railway connections from Verácruz to the interior which had been completed in 1873, and other Gulf ports were similarly linked to the hinterland during the next two decades. A Mexican-built interoceanic line spanned the Tehuantepec Isthmus in 1894, but it was so poorly erected that in 1898 an English construction firm, S. Pearson and Sons, contracted to rebuild the line. Subsequently the same company leased and operated that railroad. These material improvements served to enliven the growing Mexican economy.

The important role in world affairs played by Spain during the period from the fifteenth century through the nineteenth contrasts sharply with the utter neglect of the writings and theories of great Spanish scholars by those who have written about the development of social thought in western civilization. Almost never has the present writer seen a reference to the work of any Spaniard by those who have prepared the compendia dealing with the history of social and sociological theories which are in general use as texts and references in colleges and universities throughout the United States and Canada. This neglect seems to be paralleled in the writings of most European sociologists; and even in Latin America there appears to be little familiarity with the work of important Spanish social thinkers, exception made of the comparatively recent writings of José Ortega y Gasset.

Before he met death by his own hand in 1946, Colin Ross was one of Germany's most famous journalist-travelers. No less than fifteen books and a host of articles described his visits to countries from the Arctic to the Pacific and Haha Whenua to Africa, “ mit Kind und Kegel und Kamera ”—“ bag, baggage, and camera.” His greatest renown—or notoriety—dated from the Nazi era. Hitler himself said, “A man like Colin Ross, for example, gave me infinitely more precious information on the subject” of the Far East than all of the professional diplomats. Ross was, indeed, regarded with some exaggeration as “ one of Hitler's foremost geopoliticians,” and, probably with even greater exaggeration, as a paid spy for the Third Reich. When he visited South America in 1919-1920, however, it was suspicions of Bolshevist rather than Nazi inclinations which placed obstacles in the path of high ambitions.

On February 1, 1584, Pedro Moya de Contreras, archbishop of Mexico City, dispatched the official summons to the bishops of his ecclesiastical province to attend the Third Mexican Council set for the ninth of December of that same year. At the request of the bishop of the distant diocese of Guatemala, Fray Fernando Gómez de Córdoba, of the Order of St. Jerome, the opening date was postponed to January 20, 1585.

One of the Archbishop's letters of convocation was addressed to the first bishop of the Philippines, Fray Domingo de Salazar, Dominican. From Salazar's reply we know that the Archbishop did not insist on his personal attendance nor did he even suggest that he send a delegate. The purpose of the letter was to inform Salazar of the convocation of the Council and invite him to send a written report on conditions of the Church in the Islands, and propose such problems as he thought the assembled bishop should discuss and strive to solve.