We can carry light valuables by night, drop them down on a feather bed on the other side, load up with dutiable commodities and return before daylight, while the customs officers are shooting at lightning bugs under the impression they are aerial smugglers."9 The degree to which populist commentators were willing to proclaim the downfall of the tariff system with the emergence of tariff-avoiding aircraft highlights period concerns over economic protectionism.10 These concerns were not unique to Americans and aerial smuggling was part of a more expansive international discourse on the disruptive implications of aeronautical commerce that came to a boil in 1910. Paul Fauchille was perhaps the most eloquent on the subject, noting both the inadequacy of maritime law which did not address the problem of crimes committed by one nation's aircraft over another's territory, as well as the need for international consensus in the form of conferences and treaties.11 Such conferences did occur before the First World War, but the cataclysm prevented the implementation of substantive international agreements. In the United States, the relatively slow pace of aeronautical development meant that the problem of aerial smuggling was largely a theoretical exercise. Nonetheless, aerial smuggling was not entirely a hypothetical fiction in the pre-war years on either side of the Atlantic. The popular speculation and romanticization of the new air age soon resulted in real policies, even if aeronautical technology was not fully ready for the rigors of illicit transport. In

May 1910, the Mexican government approached President Taft's Secretary of State, Philander Knox, to regulate aerial smuggling across the U.S. southern border. Ostensibly to control tariff violations, the Mexican government had a clear interest in suppressing the movement of aircraft and aerial mercenaries from the United States in support of revolutionaries and bandits. However, most American observers recognized the problem of smuggling over the southern border as less of a problem in international relations than as a remarkably novel development in the debate between protectionism and free markets.