This work marks the fifth volume of documents prepared by the Comisión de Investigadores de la Revolución Mexicana under the direction and general editorship of Isidro Fabela. It appeared only several months before the death of the editor. Mexicanists in this country will want to acknowledge Licenciado Fabela’s many contributions to revolutionary historiography and to encourage Professors Robert Ramos, Humberto Tejera, and other members of the Comisión to continue the good work initiated by him in the field of documentary publication.

The major purpose of the documentary series is not to reproduce the famous manifestos, political plans, and other official pronouncements which by this time are available in many published accounts. Rather the emphasis is placed upon relatively unknown documents which have not been tapped adequately by investigators in the field. While the volume under review does make available once again the Díaz—Creelman interview and the Plan de San Luis Potosí, the bulk of the documents consist of personal letters and sundry dispatches of lesser magnitude. Only when viewed together, and in the context of a specific historical problem, do they assume significant proportions.

The present volume is the first in a contemplated two or three volume series treating the Madero era. It consists of 302 selected documents covering the period from March, 1908, to July, 1911. Only about ten per cent of the documents have appeared, in whole or in part, in other documentary collections and/or selected monographs.

In matters of format the editor followed the general pattern established in the first three previously published volumes (Revolución y régimen constitucionalista, I, II, and III). The documents are arranged chronologically except for the exchange of personal letters which are grouped together even though another document might fall into the intervening time lapse. Each document is preceded by a brief descriptive summary and the source from which the document was taken. The summaries, which contain editorial annotations, are quite adequate and greatly facilitate the use of the volume. There is no key to the archival abbreviations, however, and this will cause certain difficulty for those persons not familiar with Mexican repositories. The abbreviations most commonly found are the A.I.F. (Archivo Particular de Isidro Fabela), A.G.N. (Archivo General de la Nación, Ramo de la Revolución), A.D.N. (Archivo Histórico de la Defensa Nacional), and the A.R.E. (Archivo de Relaciones Exteriores de México).

This volume differs from its predecessors in several respects. The interpretive commentaries appended to the documents in Revolución y régimen constitucionalista, II and III are absent. The average length of the documents is shorter and therefore a greater variety of subjects is treated. In addition, Fabela relied less on his own fine collection of revolutionary documents and instead selected the large majority of them (241 of 302) from the Foreign Relations Archives in Mexico City. Because so many of the documents were chosen from the A.R.E. this volume is the closest Mexican approximation to our Foreign Relations for the early revolutionary period.

The dispatches of various Mexican consular officials in the United States to the Díaz government are of special interest. The standard monographs treating the early revolutionary period have concentrated, for the most part, on the activities of various revolutionary leaders and have measured the response of the Díaz government only so far as it directly affected these activities. The reaction of the entire administrative bureaucracy to the imminent threat has been slighted. The dispatches of the consular officials to the Secretary of Foreign Relations definitely can be used to fill this gap.

Viewing the contribution of this work in a larger context, it serves to acquaint the Mexicanist with the type of documentation that is to be found in the Foreign Relations Archives. The selected documents will not minimize the desire to penetrate this collection, but rather will serve to whet the appetite. One can but hope that the Mexican Ministry of Foreign Relations, now housed in new quarters, will provide investigators with a greater opportunity to fulfill this desire.