[William Archer, The Collapse of the Diaz Legend, McClure's Magazine, August 1911]

THE COLLAPSE OF THE DIAZ LEGEND

BY

WILLIAM ARCHER

AUTHOR OF "THE LIFE AND DEATH OF FERRER," ETC.

            WHAT has happened in Mexico, with dramatic and startling rapidity, is the disintegration of a legend. It was not a baseless legend: few legends are. There was a large substratum of truth in it. Many men have left unalterably graven on the tablets of history reputations far less genuine than that of Porfirio Diaz. But these were men who had the good fortune to die at the right moment.

            If ever man seemed exalted above the vicissitudes of things, it was President Diaz two years ago. He was acclaimed as the greatest man of the Western Hemisphere by men who were themselves in the running for that eminence. President Roosevelt wrote of him on March 7, 1908: " President Diaz is the greatest statesman now living, and he has done for his country what no other living man has done for any country." Secretary Root, about the same time, regretted that he was not a poet to write eulogies, or a musician to compose triumphal marches, in honor of the soldier-statesman. President Taft, at the historic meeting of October 16, 19o9, expressed: "In the name of the people of the United States, their profound admiration and high esteem for the great, illustrious, and patriotic President of the Republic of Mexico." Sr. Jose F. Godoy, of the Mexican diplomatic service, has collected in his book, "The Master Builder of a Great Commonwealth," the testimonies of more than a hundred eminent men — ambassadors, governors, senators, judges, millionaires, etc. — to the transcendent merits of the Grand Old Man of Mexico. "One of the greatest rulers in the world," "One of the greatest men now living," "Will rank in history with Washington and Lincoln," — such are the eulogies piled upon his head. After this, it need not surprise us to find official biographers, such as Mrs. Tweedie and Mr. Creelman, referring to him as "the greatest figure in modern history" and "the protagonist of the American hemisphere."

            The assumption on which all these eulogies rested was that President Diaz had brought lasting peace and prosperity to his grateful and adoring country. "There are no Anti-Porfiristas now," wrote Mrs. Tweedie in 1906. Mr. Creelman, only last year, scoffed at "the delirium of revolutionary dreaming" and said: "It is preposterous to talk about a reversion of the Mexican people to the old revolutionary habit." Mr. T. P. Terry, in his admirable Guide-Book to Mexico, concludes his sketch of the history of the Republic in this fashion:

                1904. Porfirio Diaz is again made President. Guided by the strong hand of Porfirio Diaz, the greatest Mexican, the United Mexican States join the ranks of great nations.

                1906. Great influx of foreigners and foreign capital. The Diaz Government inspires confidence, revolutions are things of the past, and $800,000,000 of foreign capital comes to Mexico.

                1909. Unexampled prosperity marks the Diaz administration.

            That was the constant burden of the songs of triumph.

Apologies for Despotism

            On all hands it was admitted; indeed, that the Republic was a republic only in name; that there was no reality either in the State or in the Federal elections; that the governors of the States, the members of Congress, and the local jefes politicos were all, directly or indirectly, nominated by the President, who practically "ran" the country with despotic power. If these facts aroused momentary qualms, all sorts of good reasons were forthcoming to allay them. The general case of the Latin-American, always prone to revolution, was in Mexico complicated by the special intermixture of a particular brand of Indian blood. Less than twenty per cent of the population were white, and the remainder were either half-breeds or pure Indians. Now,

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the Mexican Indian and the mestizo were proclaimed to be congenitally and utterly incapable of responsible citizenship. It was not yet four hundred years since their ancestors had been man-eaters; and though science does not say definitely how long it takes for a cannibal to develop into a voter, four centuries were assumed to be too short a time. Moreover, the tribes of Anahuac were gravely suspected of being of Asiatic origin; and the Asiatic, as every one knows, is born to political servitude as the sparks fly upward. The evidence of Asiatic origin is very flimsy, but it enables the defenders of the dictatorship to write down the Mexicans as "Orientals," predestined to bow their necks beneath the yoke. The fact that Benito Juarez, the great statesman and patriot, was, by this reasoning, a full-blooded "Oriental" does not seem to embarrass the theorists. General Diaz himself, indeed, is partly "Oriental" — a quarter of him was a cannibal four hundred years ago.

            He would, indeed, be a fanatical democrat who should quarrel with another people for finding contentment and prosperity in undemocratic rule. Certainly it was not for the United States, or any other nation, to insist on a scrupulous adherence to the Constitution of 1857 before entering into political or business relations with the Mexico of President Diaz. But, while the material prosperity of the country was unquestionable, the contentment of the mass of the people began to seem much more dubious. Ugly whispers got abroad to the effect that the Diaz dictatorship was not only unconstitutional, but unscrupulous and brutal. The whispers swelled into shouts; but, for various reasons, they were little regarded. They proceeded, it was said, from non -Mexican Socialists, in league with Mexican malcontents, such as every strong government necessarily begets. In some cases they were manifestly inspired by an almost frantic hatred of the Dictator. When a writer gravely attempted to prove that Diaz, the indomitable guerrilla leader, the De Wet of the French war, was a personal coward, the absurdity necessarily discounted all his other statements. Moreover, Mexico is so large a country that it was easy to find many foreign residents who declared, quite sincerely, that they had never seen anything of the atrocities alleged: just as a Frenchman who had lived for ten years in New Hampshire might make affidavit that he never saw a single case of lynching in the United States. Altogether, people were inclined to rest on the conclusion that the abuses had been grossly exaggerated. President Diaz —to put it paradoxically — was acquitted with extenuating circumstances. He did not do most of what was alleged, and what he did do he could not help. This large-minded verdict was freely indorsed by those foreigners in Mexico who had profited by the Diaz order of things and hoped to profit by its continuance. They were naturally unwilling to have it thought that they were accomplices in tyranny.

            Thus, for years, in the face of all rumor and denunciation, the legend maintained itself. President Diaz was a strong, wise, enlightened ruler, capable of sternness, even of cruelty, when the occasion demanded it, but, in the main, the beneficent father of a country inhabited by a race of unruly children. In his sterner aspects, he was comparable to Cromwell ; in his more benignant, to Washington and Lincoln. While he lived, Mexico was bound to maintain the place he had conquered for her among the splendidly solvent nations of the world. The only possible anxiety was as to what might occur when, in the fullness of time, the reins should drop from his grasp.

The Catastrophe

            Then came the sudden disillusionment. In 1909 the almost octogenarian President allowed it to be given out to the world that he would not seek reelection in the following year. There are various theories as to his motive in making this announcement. Some think he believed himself so overwhelmingly popular that the nation would rise as one man and implore him to remain at his post. Others hold that he wanted to see what candidates announced themselves for his succession, in order that he might crush them in time. The only theory that finds no partizans is that to which I personally incline — namely, that he may have been sincere. If so, he certainly changed his mind. Not only did he have himself "unanimously" reelected, but he imprisoned a rival candidate, Francisco I. Madero, and insisted on the reelection to the Vice-Presidency of Ramón Corral, a man wholly inacceptable to the nation. This was more than even Mexican human nature could endure. The momentary promise of liberty, however faintly believed in, had whetted people's appetite, and the oft-repeated farce of the reelection exasperated them beyond endurance. A revolt broke out — as a trifling affair that would easily be put down in a few days or a few weeks. But the days and the weeks passed, and peace was no nearer. On the contrary, independent movements of revolt broke out on every hand, until scarcely a State remained unaffected; and the government was powerless to crush them. Chaos had come again — that chaos which had

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been declared absolutely unthinkable so long as the "strong hand of Porfirio Diaz" was there to maintain order. The rebellion paralyzed the country, frightened away capital, and constantly threatened to bring about international complications. Presently the amazed world saw the government going, hat in hand, to the rebel chief (who was not even a soldier!), begging for an armistice and a discussion of terms. It tried, at first, to assume a haughty air and pretend that the one thing excluded from all possible discussion was the resignation of Diaz. But, day by day, rebellion crept nearer the capital, and, day by day, it became clearer that the government could not cope with it. What had seemed for some time to be a stalemate turned out to be a checkmate complete and absolute. After clinging desperately to a last semblance of free will,—he would resign only when peace was restored, — Porfirio Diaz, the revered, the dreaded, the all-powerful Don Porfirio, stepped down unconditionally from his throne, the victim of one of the greatest reversals of fortune recorded in history. The catastrophes of the two Napoleons were, of course, more tremendous in scale, but not more tragic; for neither Napoleon the Great nor Napoleon the Little had seemed so secure or had received such universal homage. And neither was eighty years old.

The Mexican Army

            The causes of this great downfall will be analyzed in the following pages; but its immediate cause was, of course, the hopeless failure of the Diaz army. The fact that this should have taken the world by surprise is an illustration of the blind faith instilled into even the most far-sighted people by the Diaz legend. Why should an army so recruited have been expected to fight? It is a "penal army." It is largely composed of actual criminals condemned to what may be called military servitude; and still more largely of men who are not really criminals, but have come in conflict with some jefe politico or other person in authority, and have been drafted into the army by an exercise of pure tyranny. Thus, it is neither a voluntary force, nor one raised by fair and equitable conscription. It is a body of slaves whose slavery was disguised by a wretched pittance of pay, until the government, under the stress of need, trebled it at a single stroke and made it fifty cents a day. These facts were known to everybody ; there was no concealment about them; yet such was the glamour of Diaz's name that people actually trusted to this slave force to suppress a serious insurrection. The wonder is that the soldiers fought as they did: more especially as they were miserably provided with war material. While he ruthlessly suppressed all rivals, Diaz, in his later years at any rate, allowed himself to be hoodwinked by his confederates, who pocketed the money that ought to have been spent on munitions and stores. His case was very like that of Napoleon III in 1870. Like Napoleon, he had trumpeted to the world, "L'autocratie, c'est la paix"; and his débâcle, like that of Napoleon, shows the worth of a peace founded on corruption.

The Lesson of the Downfall

            On the faith of the Diaz Legend, some thirty thousand American lives and from three to five hundred million American dollars have been confided to the guardianship of the Mexican Bismarck, the Strong Hand; and, all of a sudden, these lives and these dollars are found to be mere hostages and pledges in the power of a potentially and not improbably hostile people of semi-barbarous traditions. If this appear an unduly pessimistic statement of the case, let it be remembered that a hostage is not always, is not often, sacrificed. None the less is it true that the foreign nations who have "interests" in Mexico will have to walk very warily until a settled order is established — and afterward. And the moral of the crisis surely is that they should look for the reestablishment of lasting peace, not to another Dictator, but to some one who should combine the Strong Hand (in due season) with a sincere respect for democratic institutions and a genuine love for the Mexican people. "What should you like to happen now?" I said to an American resident who knew the country intimately. "I should like Porfirio Diaz to grow thirty years younger," was the reply. With all respect, I think he took a very short-sighted view. The miracle for which he sighed might conceivably bring peace in his time, but would only postpone the inevitable. The plain lesson which results from a dispassionate examination of the past thirty years of Mexican history is, "Put not your trust in despots."

Diaz as a Soldier

            The enemies of General Diaz are not content to attack him as a statesman: they seek to belittle him as a soldier. There they make a mistake. The testimony of French and German historians of the war of the French Intervention is all in his favor. They write of him, not only as a first-rate fighter, but as a man of honor. He kept the patriot cause alive in

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Oaxaca at a time when elsewhere it was at a very low ebb; and, on the whole, he may fairly share with Benito Juarez the credit of having baffled the schemes of Napoleon III and kept European monarchy out of the Western Hemisphere. It is a little to be regretted, perhaps, that he suffered the anniversary of his storming of Puebla (April 2, 1867) to be made a national festival. But there may have been more policy than vainglory in this course. In General Zaragoza's victory of the cinco de Mayo, which gave the nation its great patriotic anniversary, he had taken but a subordinate part. He may have felt that an exclusively Porfirist feast-day was necessary to complete his prestige, and may have permitted the consecration of the second of April rather to consolidate his position than to gratify his vanity.

            On one point there is no conflict of evidence: he was resolutely faithful to the national cause, and sternly rejected all temptations to treason. Both Maximilian and Bazaine endeavored to undermine his loyalty, without the smallest success. Furthermore, it is certain that, after having handled large sums of money under circumstances that would amply have excused the keeping of scant accounts, he came out of the French war a poor man, with arrears of pay owing to him. When President Juarez, after the execution of Maximilian, entered the capital that Diaz had reconquered for him, he found over $50,000* in the treasury — an almost miraculous result, achieved by the ability and honesty of Diaz alone.

            Though a fine tactician, Diaz was probably not a great strategist. It is true that he had little opportunity of displaying strategic power. Not until the end of his career did he ever hold independent command of any considerable army; and he never had the opportunity of scheming a large campaign. But in his pronunciamientos of 1872 and 1876 he made several strategic mistakes; and one of the faults of his statesmanship has been a lack of that prevision of large consequences which is an essential element in strategy.

            These two rebellions, first against President Juarez and second against his successor, Lerdo, have been set down as proofs of mere personal ambition. This view, again, I can not share. Neither Juarez nor Lerdo showed much capacity for restoring internal order in the country or for rescuing it from the slough of bankruptcy in which the War of Reform and the French war had left it. Diaz felt that he could do both of these things; and when Juarez first, and then Lerdo, denied him all opportunity, by forcing their reelection to the Presidency, what wonder if Diaz resorted to the traditional Latin-American method of correcting electoral fraud by an appeal to arms? He then denounced his opponents on precisely the same grounds on which the revolutionists of to-day denounce his own rule. He declared that forced reelections made the Constitution a sham; that the legislature and the judiciary had become mere tools of the executive government; that the sovereignty of the States had been sacrificed to arbitrary power, and the will of the people suppressed by. barbarous butcheries. Word for word, this is Madero's indictment of Diaz; but that does not prove that Diaz was insincere when he hurled the same reproaches at Juarez and Lerdo. There is nothing to show, and it is highly improbable, that, without an appeal to arms, Diaz or any one else would have been allowed a fair field for his political energies and aspirations.

Pro-Gringoism versus Anti-Gringoism

            It was no mere personal rivalry — no mere military resentment of civilian rule — that led him to rebel. At the root of the feud there was a real, fundamental difference of principle. Both Juarez and Lerdo were not only careless of economic development and progress — they were deliberately opposed to it. And why? Because they knew that economic development meant intimate intercourse with the United States, and because they distrusted and feared "the adjacent Republic of the North." Juarez was bitterly opposed to the extension of the American railway system into Mexico. "Between the weak and the strong," he is reported to have said, "let the desert intervene." Diaz, on the other hand, was a child of the new age, enamoured of material progress. He knew that it would need more than a few leagues of cactus and mesquit to form a permanent barrier between the weak and the strong. He had no taste for the heroic but vain endeavor to keep out the ocean with a mop. What he wanted was to see Mexico peaceful and solvent; he felt himself to be the one man who could grapple with an appallingly difficult situation; and he saw no chance, under a practically unworkable constitution, of being suffered to try his hand at the task.

            The current of the age was with him, and he conquered; but we are not, therefore, to write down Juarez a mere pedantic obstructionist. From the point of view of Mexican nationality and individuality, his fear of "the adjacent Republic of the North" has amply justified itself. The permeation of Mexico by Anglo-Saxondom has been even more thorough than

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* Throughout this article, sums of money are stated in United States or gold currency, not in Mexican pesos.

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he could have foreseen. The real point at issue between him and Diaz was whether Mexico ought or ought not to struggle obstinately against the inevitable. It was a contest between ideal patriotism and practical sense; and practical sense, having won the day, proceeded to despise and ignore the claims of ideal patriotism. That is the sin which the victor is now expiating.

Diaz the Peace-Maker— The " Massacre" of Vera Cruz

            It may be freely admitted that when Diaz came to power in 1876, he was probably the only man who could have restored peace and order in Mexico. He was strong and he was adroit. He knew how to conciliate, but he also knew how to crush. The method of "set a thief to catch a thief," whereby hundreds of bandits were converted into mounted policemen, or rurales, did not originate with Diaz; but he carried it out energetically and successfully. Discontented officers, his late brothers in arms, he solaced with administrative billets, for governorships downwards. The only serious attempt at a rising, the Lerdist pronunciamiento of Vera Cruz in June, 1879, he promptly smothered in blood. For this so-called "Vera Cruz massacre" he has been unduly blamed and unnecessarily defended. The Governor of Vera Cruz, General Mier y Teran, telegraphed to him that there were soldiers involved in the conspiracy, and asked: " If they rise, shall I shoot them?" Diaz replied, "En caliente, si," which his apologists interpret as meaning, " If in the heat of action, yes." Spanish scholars must decide whether this is a tenable interpretation. I will only say that the dictionary renders en caliente by the simple word "immediately," and that General Teran scarcely required telegraphic authority for the shooting of rebels "in the heat of action." The practical effect of the phrase was probably "without formality" or "without legal process." Teran, as a matter of fact, shot nine men, some of them civilians. It is not denied that they were plotting an armed rebellion, and it is only too certain that military executions en caliente were an established tradition of the country. It seems unreasonable, therefore, to reckon this among the Dictator's crimes. Madero* speaks with horror of the event, and says" it has had a great influence in instilling the basest terror into the multitude, and has paralyzed the energies of good sons of Mexico, zealous for her rights and jealous of her liberties." But, by Madero's own admission in many places, the liberty of armed insurrection was one that Diaz could not possibly acknowledge, and he did the country a great and indispensable service in putting it down. It is hard to see, then, why we should condemn him for an act which potently contributed to that end, by striking a crushing blow at the intolerable habit of military sedition. Teran was court-martialed for exceeding his instructions, and lost his post. Perhaps this was inevitable; but I confess that there is a suggestion of hypocrisy in the punishment of the agent which seems to me uglier than the fact of the "massacre."

            It would be unfair, then, to look with a too critical eye into the measures of repression adopted during Diaz's early terms of office. The country was just emerging from chaos; its one crying need was peace; and though it be true, as Sr. Rafael de Zayas puts it, that the peace Diaz secured for it was "mechanical," not "organic," that was not, in those early years, to be avoided. His fault lies, not in imposing mechanical peace at first, but in taking no measures, during his long term of power, to convert it into organic peace.

            Meanwhile, he actively engaged in establishing (one cannot say "reestablishing") the financial credit of the nation. The complicated processes by which the foreign debt was consolidated and reduced (approximately) from $116,000,000 to $73,000,000 were probably not devised by the President himself; but it was his spirit that inspired, and his resolution that achieved, the great operation. National credit being placed on a firm footing, capital began to flow in, and prosperity advanced by those "leaps and bounds" which the panegyrists of Diaz love to display in picturesque diagrams and imposing columns of figures.

The Glamour of " Material Prosperity "

            But it was just here that, as I read the story, Diaz broke down. Just as the legend of his greatness was beginning to crystallize, he was entering upon the course of action which proved his littleness. He broke down partly for lack of economic knowledge, but mainly from defect of character. He has been called the Moses of the Mexican people, and it is true that he led them through the Red Sea of civil war and anarchy; but, arrived on dry land, he at once proceeded to bow down and worship the Golden Calf, and thereby undid in great measure the service he had rendered his countrymen.

            This is a figurative way of stating the simple

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* In his book, " La Sucesion Presidential en 1910" Madero, of course, is no impartial judge ; but no one can read his book without realizing that it is a piece of honest criticism, which sincerely aims at impartiality. For access to this rare book I am indebted to the courtesy of Sr. Don Fernando Iglesias Calderón of Mexico City.  

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psychological fact that Diaz was hypnotized by the idea of material prosperity. He eagerly followed, not a pillar of fire, but an ever-growing column of figures. He mistook the wealth of the country for its well being. With all his unlimited power, he encouraged the exploitation of its resources, both by foreigners and by a narrow circle of wealthy natives; and he did absolutely nothing for the welfare of the masses of the people. Meanwhile, he persuaded himself, rightly or wrongly, that his unbroken tenure of power was indispensable to the continuance of the "leaps and bounds" of prosperity; wherefore he shrank from no measure that tended to consolidate his reign or to free him from dangerous rivalry. Far from educating his countrymen for real democracy, he crushed every attempt at the manifestation of political free will. Thus his despotism has been beneficent only on paper. Measured by the one true standard, that of human well being and worth, it has been rather a curse than a blessing to the country.

Opening the Flood gates

            What is the truth, now, as to this material prosperity to which everything else has been sacrificed? At the time of Queen Victoria's jubilee, enthusiastic journalists wrote as though that conscientious and admirable woman had invented the locomotive, the telegraph, and the telephone, had laid the Atlantic cable, and had written "The Origin of Species," " Vanity Fair," and "David Copperfield." Not otherwise do the eulogists of Diaz speak as though he had personally built all the railways, sunk all the mines, erected all the factories, and asphalted all the streets which are the pride of twentieth-century Mexico. The truth is that he came into power just when the time was ripe for the industrialization of the country. He found capital and enterprise ready and waiting to flow in: all he had to do was to open the flood-gates. Did he take any pains to consider how far it was politic, for the sake of rapid development, to alienate the public domain? On the contrary, he scattered with both hands, to capitalists who had gained his favor, privileges and franchises of incalculable value. I have heard the holder of a perpetual concession, such as no wise statesman would ever have granted, tell in the most matter-of-fact way how he shows his gratitude by making a large "rake-off" in his yearly return of profits for purposes of taxation. "Everybody does it," he said; and, whether that be true or not, it is certain that he and his class think, and have been encouraged by Porfirio Diaz to think, that Mexico exists simply for their enrichment. Has the Dictator, in distributing these vast largesses, tried to secure for the people any compensation in the shape of advanced wages? On the contrary, he has consistently aided the capitalists (sometimes, as we shall see, by very "drastic" methods) in the endeavor to keep wages down. In short, he has shown neither scientific statesmanship nor enlightened patriotism. He has allowed a treasure-house to be rifled, and has taken pride in the statistics that show (imperfectly) the extent of the depredations.

            That Mexico required foreign capital for her development is true enough. But there is a wide distinction between capital borrowed by native enterprise, of which the interest alone goes abroad, and capital employed by foreign enterprise, whereof the whole profits go abroad, the country benefiting only in (very low) wages and (often very inadequate) taxation. Had Diaz borne in mind this distinction, the development of Mexico would have been much slower, indeed, but also much healthier. As it was, he caught the "get-rich-quick" fever, and, in pursuit of a mainly statistical wealth, he created an extremely delicate international situation, for which a peaceful solution will be hard to find, while a solution by force of arms would be unspeakably terrible and disastrous.

Diaz and the Railways

            To the international question we shall have to return later. In the meantime, let us glance at the history of the Mexican railways, so typical of the Dictator's statecraft. In the forefront of all the panegyrics of Diaz stand these impressive figures:

                                    1876                                        1910

                        407 miles of railways               15,000 miles of railways

            This certainly looks very striking; but let us turn to the speech made by Sr. José Limantour, the able Minister of Finance, in introducing to the Chamber of Deputies the bill for the famous merger of the leading lines, which took effect two years ago. He said:

                The railways of our country have been constructed, not in obedience to a plan thought out in advance, but according as different enterprises have applied for concessions in order to unite this or that point or region with this or that other point or region. There has been a lack of any general idea in the tracing of our lines, which has been the work of circumstances, of particular interests, and of the needs of the moment. This absence of plan could not but lead to an unsatisfactory result. Very important regions are not yet united by railway to the rest of the country, while there are others which possess two and even three parallel lines for a traffic which would barely support one.

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            Lines, moreover, had been carried at great expense through difficult country, merely that they might serve certain great estates, while others had been run where they were not wanted, merely because the country happened to be easy. A glance at the map is sufficient to prove the general truth of Limantour's statement, which is in effect a most damaging indictment of the railway policy, or lack of policy, of Porfirio Diaz. It is true that in some other countries railways have been suffered to spread over the face of the land in the same haphazard way; but these countries did not enjoy the advantages of despotic rule. Here, if anywhere, an enlightened autocrat might have done something to justify his existence; and here, by the testimony of his own chief minister and confederate, Diaz had hopelessly failed. He had shown no foresight, no statesmanship. He had simply allowed capital and influence to scramble recklessly for rights of exploitation, never dreaming of subordinating their eagerness to a rational scheme of development. General Diaz, as I said before, is no strategist.

            The much-criticized merger, by which the government acquired a controlling interest in almost the whole railway system of the country, was the work, not of Diaz, but of Limantour. Diaz at first opposed it; and, when it was accomplished, he permitted it to be violently assailed in the press; for he endured attacks upon his ministers with considerable fortitude. After some examination into the matter, I am inclined to think that it was a wise operation honestly conducted; but I can not pretend to see very clearly through the maze of figures. Down to the outbreak of the revolt, and even later, it justified itself conspicuously through the economies which it secured, without any increase of rates or injury to the public service. But, in the event of a long period of disorder, the obligations undertaken by the government might prove burdensome enough.

Mexican Prosperity in Its True Proportions

            Regarding as a whole the "Wonderful Results of Diaz's Rule," we have only to compare the statistics of other countries during a similar period to see that the results are neither particularly wonderful nor specially to be attributed to Diaz's rule. The only fair comparison, of course, lies between Mexico and other Latin-American republics. The railways of Mexico, as we have seen, increased from 407 miles in 1876 to 15,000 miles in 1910. Between 1874 and 1906 the railways of Argentina increased from 1,800 miles to 12,274; while those of Brazil (a country which offers peculiar hindrances to railway development) increased between 1880 and 1905 from 1,934 miles to 10,891 miles. Thus the Mexican increase is seen to be nothing in the least surprising, especially when we consider that the Mexican lines had for their base, as it were, the highly developed railway system of the United States.

            Statistics of growth in other departments tell the same story. The following table shows the increase of exports and imports in Mexico during thirty-three years, in Argentina during thirty- two years, and in Brazil during only sixteen years:

                        Mexico                          Argentina                     Brazil

Exports

                        $101,892,803              $276,000,000              $125,000,000

Imports

                        $59,458,703                $137,314,420              $51,020,205

            To interpret these figures quite fairly, we should have to take into account such factors as the area and population of the respective countries—a task too complex to be attempted here.* But at least we may safely say that Mexico does not take the decided lead of her sister republics which her proximity to the United States might lead us to expect.

            The diagram of total foreign commerce for 1909, published by the International Bureau of the American Republics, places Mexico in a very modest position among her peers.

            So much for the material-prosperity aspect of the legend; let us now look at that side of it which represents Diaz as the benefactor of his grateful people.

The Poverty of the Peon

            No one can spend twenty-four hours in Mexico without seeing more abject poverty than he would see in as many days in — I will not say the well-to-do countries of Europe, but Ireland, or Italy, or Spain. Nowhere in the Western world have I seen anything like the utter destitution that meets one on every hand in Mexico. I am not speaking of beggars: it did not seem to me that actual mendicancy was more common than in southern Europe. I am referring to the working, wage-earning populace, or the people who carry on small trades and industries. Never in any country have I seen such rags; never in any country so much unintentionally bare human flesh; never such miserable makeshifts doing duty for human habitations. I have seen families housed beneath

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* It has been carried out by Sr. G. Maqueo Castellanos in his book " Algunos Problemas Nacionales "; and the result arrived at is practically that above indicated — that Mexico holds a fair average position, and no more.

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three or four strips of corrugated iron balanced against an adobe wall; or crouching in a wigwam made of old railway ties stuck up against a tree; or literally burrowing in a cliff of sand, with a sheet of canvas or corrugated iron to serve as a front wall to the cave. In some seasons, no doubt, and in some parts of the country, the climate renders such penury more endurable than it would be elsewhere; but the winter climate of the plateau of Anahuac is anything but genial. The conditions in the mesons or bunk-houses of the cities are, it is said, indescribably bad. It is evident that none of the boasted wealth of the country filters down to the lowest social level.

            One has only to look at that peculiar Mexican institution, the cargador, to see how cheap is human nerve and muscle in this country. At any hour of the day, on the asphalted avenues of Mexico City,— in front of the gorgeous white marble million-dollar Opera House, a monument to Italian bad taste and Mexican prodigality, or beside the steel framework of the projected Legislative Palace, which is, or was, to eclipse in splendor all the parliament houses of the world,— you may see a couple of cargadores jogging along with a huge sideboard or wardrobe between them, or with half the furniture of a household piled on their backs, thus advertising the fact that legs are cheaper than even that simple piece of mechanism, the wheel. As they amble onward, like clockwork figures, your mind goes back to the runners who carried fish from the sea to Tenochtitlan in four-and-twenty hours, for the table of Montezuma. You think, too, of the huge Aztec monoliths in the Museum, which must have been handled by the ancestors of these cargadores, working in battalions under the slave-driver's lash. The cheapness of human life is an ancient tradition in Mexico. You see it again in the primitive plows and other implements with which regiments of peons scratch at the endless fields of the great haciendas. Diaz, it is certain, did not create these conditions of life and labor. But what has he done to amend them? Absolutely nothing. He did not create the slavery which exists in many parts of Mexico. But what has he done to check it? Absolutely nothing.

Mexican Slavery

            As to the fact that men are enslaved for debt, and are treated as marketable merchandise, there is not the least shadow of doubt. Those who set forth to deny it do not in reality do so, but admit, explain, and palliate it. One favorite line of defense is to point to the so-called "peonage" of the Southern United States, and suggest that those who live in glass houses should not throw stones. Peonage (the very word comes from Mexico) is, indeed, indefensible; but it is not carried on under the aegis of a benevolent despot whose untiring solicitude for the welfare of his people we are called upon to admire. It is, moreover, a sporadic evil, a local abuse. Whole communities are not thrust into it at the bayonet's point, nor is it recruited by processes of systematic fraud and kidnapping. If conditions in the Southern States were as bad as those in Mexico, that would be no defense for Porfirio Diaz; and, as a matter of fact, there is no reason to believe that they are nearly as bad.

            The Mexican Constitution absolutely prohibits slavery of any sort. "No one," it says, "can be obliged to render personal service without a fair remuneration and without his full consent, save as to labor imposed as a penalty by the judicial authority." And again, "The -State can not permit the consummation of any contract or agreement having for its object the curtailment, loss, or irrevocable sacrifice of the liberty of the individual." But the State, under President Diaz, not only permitted, but enforced through its police and gendarmery, thousands of such "contracts," if so they can be called. There is conflict of evidence, and there is room for doubt, as to the amount of actual cruelty practised under this system. But two unquestionable facts may in this connection be pointed out. It would be nothing short of a miracle if a people with the ancestry, the history, and the traditions of the Mexicans were constitutionally humane. Neither their Spanish nor their Indian forefathers were particularly squeamish as to torture or massacre; and to this day their favorite sports are cock-fighting and bull-fighting. I would not for a moment imply that all Mexicans are cruel; what I mean is that there is nothing in their antecedents to render it probable that they have any special power of resisting the temptations to cruelty which slavery inevitably presents. For—this is the second fact to which attention must be called —when a man receives no wages or other reward for his labor, there is no argument by which he can be induced to work, save pain or the fear of pain. In this respect the slave is exactly in the position of a horse or other beast of burden. If a horse is lazy, we do not turn him loose and buy another, for that would be a dead loss; we do not dock his provender, for that would diminish his efficiency; we simply apply the whip or spur, and repeat the application whenever it is necessary. Some of us shrink from even this animal slavery; but most men who have to do with horses become more or less hardened to it. And

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the history of human slavery shows that slave-driving, far more than horse-driving, renders a man callous. In the case of human beasts of burden, laziness or inefficiency very soon comes to wear an appearance of contumacy, and to excite a fierce resentment such as men seldom feel toward dumb animals. It is indeed a rare character that can resist the depraving effect of unlimited power over a fellow man, and constant temptation to inflict pain upon him. Apart from the credibility of the witnesses to gross cruelties on the plantations of Yucatan and the Valle National,—and their credibility seems very high,—one sees nothing in their accounts which would not almost inevitably arise from the admitted conditions of the case.

            Mr. James Creelman, who visited Yucatan and found it, apparently, swept and garnished for the occasion, admits "that there are many evils attendant on the custom of allowing, or enticing, henequen workers to go heavily in debt to their employers, and that here and there a planter takes advantage of his power and isolated position to be cruel or unjust." Yet, a few pages farther on, Mr. Creelman declares that "the most persistent search could not reveal a single instance in which a man was whipped for refusing to work." If there are men, and this is not denied, who work for no wage, and with no prospect or hope of any reward, it would be curious to know by what motive, other than the lash or the fear of the lash, they are induced to go forth to their labor in the morning. What the Yucatecan proverb says of the Indian is fundamentally true of all slaves — "they hear only with their backs."

The Tragedy of the Yaqui

            In most of the Mexican forms of slavery President Diaz has simply acquiesced. His acquiescence has been part of his general policy of doing and sanctioning nothing that could possibly upset the labor market or embarrass his capitalist allies. But in the case of the Yaqui Indians he has actively and decisively intervened; so that this case merits some examination.

            Long and complicated has been the feud between the Mexican government and this hapless tribe. The government has published an elaborate history, in three hundred and fifty folio pages, with the purpose of showing that, from 1529 onwards, each successive authority has been at war with the irrepressible Yaqui, except during the eighty-five years between 1740 and 1825. The author of this volume, under the date of April 2, 1903 (the Porfirist fiesta, by the way), declared that there remained only three courses open to the government: (1) A war of extermination; (2) The deportation of the whole tribe, and its dispersion over distant parts of the national territory; (3) The colonization of the Yaqui Valley. I do not know precisely what "colonization" means in this context; nor does it greatly matter, for it was the second course, not the third, that was adopted.

            Now, the Yaqui Indians are declared by all impartial observers to be a very fine race of people. The great ethnologist, Dr. Karl Lumholtz, speaks of them in the highest terms. Their intelligence is as remarkable as their physical endurance. They have, what is rare among aboriginal tribes, a good deal of mechanical aptitude. They are an agricultural people, inhabiting the rich valley of the river in Sonora which is called by their name. Probably it is the desirability of their territory that has been their ruin. That they have committed murders and depredations is not denied: the question is, how far they have been badgered and harried into outlawry. It is also a question whether any possible crime or series of crimes could have merited the punishment meted out to them —that of wholesale deportation and practical enslavement. In droves of hundreds at a time,—men, women, and children,—they were transported, with the utmost brutality of treatment, from one extremity of the Republic to the other, and into a climate — that of Yucatan —known to be rapidly fatal to them. Twenty-five million dollars, says Francisco Madero, has been lavished upon this war; and he pertinently asks what might not have been accomplished by the expenditure of such a sum on works of pacification. But there were interests to be served by deportation; and the people who profited by the scandal are well known. At last the country became so depopulated that in the surrounding region no harvesters were to be had; whereupon the landowners remonstrated with the Dictator. As a result, the decree of deportation was suspended, but with the proviso that for every crime committed by a Yaqui 500 of his people should be deported.* Such is the justice of the Strong Hand.

            No doubt a specious case can be made out for what Mr. Creelman calls "this stern, but comparatively merciful, policy." Indeed, one can almost trace the finger of Providence in the transaction. The land of the Yaquis was wanted in Sonora, while their labor was wanted in Yucatan. It was a manifest blessing that

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* This almost incredible statement is Francisco Madero's. Is it possible that "500" is a misprint for " 50 "?

MAP SHOWING THE INDISCRIMINATE WAY IN WHICH MEXICAN RAILWAYS WERE BUILT. VERY IMPORTANT REGIONS ARE NOT YET UNITED BY RAILWAY TO THE REST OF THE COUNTRY, WHILE OTHERS POSSESS TWO AND EVEN THREE PARALLEL LINES FOR TRAFFIC THAT WOULD BARELY SUPPORT ONE. IN SOME INSTANCES LONG LINES HAVE BEEN BUILT FOR THE ACCOMMODATION OF REMOTE ESTATES

their character should have been such as to afford a pretext for a rearrangement which satisfied both these needs.

The Law of Unappropriated Lands

            In Diaz's whole policy with relation to the land we can clearly trace the same desire to favor the rich and strong at the cost of the poor and weak. For instance, the law of Terrenos Baldíos, or unappropriated lands, dating from 1894, practically permits the "denunciation" of any land to which the occupant cannot show a complete legal title, and so arms the great landowner with a means of "rounding off" his possessions by ousting his poorer neighbors who have merely a prescriptive claim to their holdings. A sound national policy would have dictated just the opposite course: to wit, an enactment whereby those who had held undisturbed possession of a parcel of land for a stated number of years should be enabled, on proof of that fact, to register their title and maintain it against all comers. In a largely illiterate country, where written instruments are necessarily few, to demand legal evidence of title as an alternative to ejectment was simply to give a free hand to the wealthy land-grabber. The law has covered the country with Naboth's Vineyards; and this although the concentration of land in the hands of a few territorial magnates had long been recognized as one of the great evils from which Mexico was suffering. The Terrazas family, in Chihuahua, for instance, owns about twenty-five thousand square miles of country—a territory twice as large as the State of Maryland. This is perhaps an extreme example; but enormous properties are the rule, not the exception; and as the owners of these vast estates are apt to be appointed governors or magistrates of one sort or another, the power they wield is almost unlimited. It is now recognized that one of the urgent needs of the country is a class of peasant proprietors, and measures are under discussion for the purchase of land by the government and its breaking up into small holdings. It is pointed out that the very unequal value of land, depending as it does on the abundance or scarcity of water, places great difficulties in the way of purchase

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WILLIAM ARCHER  405

and subdivision. But these difficulties would be largely overcome by an equitable, instead of an arbitrary and unjust, system of taxation, such as should lead to a diffusion, rather than a concentration, of the all-important water rights. The way in which the rich elude taxation, while the tax-gatherer is forever and inexorably on the track of the poor, is one of the crying scandals of Mexico. One of the most terrible incidents of the Diaz rule— the so-called "War of Tomóchic "—arose upon a question of taxation.

            The fact that the Dictator has never dared to antagonize "moneyed interests" is further illustrated by the absence of any serious attempts, by taxation or otherwise, to check the drink traffic, which is one of the curses of Mexico. The thousands of acres given up to the cultivation of maguey, for the making of pulque and mezcal, may look well in agricultural statistics; but Madero is certainly right when he says that the profits derived from this source "ought not to be considered as a form of national wealth, but a cause of decadence."

Capital and Labor

            And if the benevolent autocrat has consistently sided with the great hacendado, as against the peon and the serf, so, too, has he invariably favored the industrial employer as against the workman. One would have supposed that, where so many factories and mines are worked under more than generous concessions, some endeavor might have been made to secure an offset in the shape of moderately favorable conditions of employment. No such sentimental notion ever occurred to President Diaz. One may search the Mexican statute-book in vain for any factory act or employers' liability act, or child-labor act. I have seen boys of ten or twelve doing nerve-straining if not actually laborious work in attendance on huge, clattering machines, and learned on inquiry that their hours were from six to six and their earnings twenty -five cents a day. Mining companies and other large employers have their own police; and they often contrive to get one of their staff, a secretary or bookkeeper, appointed comisario, or justice of the peace, so as to hold the workmen in the hollow of their hands. In labor disputes Diaz has always sided with the masters and has frowned upon trade-unionism. There is little doubt that he ordered the terrible massacre that followed upon a strike riot at Rio Blanco, near Orizaba. His object probably was to paralyze discontent and show that labor organization would not be tolerated. The same policy accounts for the indiscriminate shooting by which the troubles at the Cananea copper-mines were put down. "Is the government entirely powerless in such cases," asks Madero, "to protect the interests of the Mexican workman? . . . It did not care though the miners died of hunger, so long as they died in an orderly fashion, silently, without protest."

            It is said that Diaz has actually issued orders to employers who were willing to raise wages forbidding them to do so. This may or may not be true: what is certain is that he has never displayed the smallest solicitude for the economic progress of the Mexican proletariat, or their advance to a higher standard of living. One is strongly tempted to see in him an example of that snobbery which leads the parvenu to despise the class from which he himself has risen. The plaint of the peon has been unheard on the serene heights of Chapultepec, to which the millionaire concession-holder and the territorial magnate have always had ready access. The benefit to the common people accruing

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from thirty years of benevolent despotism is well summed up by Madero when he says: "Of all America, Mexico is the only country whose inhabitants emigrate. In spite of the humiliations they suffer in the United States, they are better off there."

            Judging the Diaz rule, then, by its results, and trying to express them in terms of human happiness and welfare, we find the sum total insignificant, if not a minus quantity. The legend rests upon columns of figures which look very imposing until we place other columns of figures beside them. Thirty-five years of peace and solvency may undoubtedly be put down to the Dictator's credit, along with an eager alacrity in the fostering of industrial development, not to say exploitation. But of constructive, or even regulative, wisdom there is little trace. Certain public works, indeed, with the drainage of the valley of Mexico at their head, have been substantially beneficial. But it is hard to point to a single legislative enactment which has benefited the mass of the people, reformed an unjust or retrograde condition, or helped to place on a firm basis the well being of the coming generations.

The Methods of the Super-Man

            If, now, we look a little further and inquire by what means the thirty-five years of peace have been secured, we find still less reason to regard Porfirio Diaz as the benefactor of his country. He was the first, and probably the sincerest, dupe of his own legend. He very soon came to regard himself as the man of destiny, indispensable to the welfare of Mexico; and he shrank from no conceivable method of safeguarding and consolidating his power. "Who wills the end, wills the means"; and Diaz possessed not only an indomitable will, but a robust conscience.

            Sr. Francisco Bulnes, a well-known politician and deputy from Lower California, has applied to the Diaz rule an often-quoted phrase, which scarcely calls for translation. It has been characterized, says Sr. Bulnes, by "el mínimum de terror y el máximum de benevolencia." "If you substitute 'corruption' for 'benevolence,'" an eminent historian said to me, "you come nearer the mark." Another gentleman present proposed another emendation. " It is not true," he said, "that Diaz has employed 'a minimum of terror'; but it is true that he has preferred corruption to terror, and has fallen back upon terror, as a rule, only where corruption has failed." This is one of the reproaches which a stern patriotism levels against him. "A frank dictatorship," says Madero, "is only a parenthesis in the democratic development of peoples, which then sets in afresh in a powerful reaction. But a hypocritical dictatorship, which appears to respect constitutional forms, undermines the foundations of liberty. The citizens see themselves suavely oppressed by a hand that caresses them, by a hand always prodigal of material good things."

            When one speaks of corruption in this context, one does not mean — at least, I do not —that Diaz is personally corrupt. His enemies, of course, aver that he is. They declare that he has amassed a fortune, of which they do not hesitate to give you the exact figures. Some place it at thirty million dollars,* others at forty-five million. After diligent inquiry, I can find no evidence of personal "graft" on his part, and several people have told me of facts within their own knowledge which point in the opposite direction. The legends of his actual poverty are probably no less untrue; but I see no reason to believe that Diaz has made illegitimate profits out of his position. The accusation is not that he has taken bribes, but that he has given them. He has always preferred buying a man to crushing him — that is to say, where the man was at all worth buying.

The " Cientificos"

            This is little more than a restatement of the fact that he has secured peace and ruled the country by making friends with the Mammon of Unrighteousness. His government has been an autocracy based upon a plutocracy. He has gathered round him a band of devoted adherents by distributing to them political and administrative offices which enabled them to act up to the first commandment of the Porfirist decalogue — "Get rich quick!" If he has not robbed the country himself, he has winked with both eyes at systematic robbery by others. I should be very sorry to believe that all the Cientificos are dishonest. Some of them, I am sure, are honorable gentlemen — men whose wealth antedates the Diaz period, and who are incapable of baseness and fraud. Even these men, however, were bound to the dictatorship by ties of interest. In no unworthy or reprehensible sense, they had "come in on the ground floor." The origin and meaning of the term Cientifico is not clear, but it may fairly be taken to imply one who has "inside information," who is behind the scenes, who is in a position to take advantage of any wind that blows. And, honest or not, these men felt the security of their city palaces and their country principalities to be

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* Madero rejects this rumor as a calumny and says: "As an administrator he has always been upright."

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dependent on the endurance of the Diaz administration. They formed a solid body-guard around the throne. They did their best to promulgate the Diaz legend, some of them, I dare say, devoutly believing in it. One of them said to me, with perfect gravity and simplicity, that what the country now needed was some one who should continue "the noble and liberal policy of the President." The more clear-sighted, however, would scarcely demur to Sr. de Zayas' definition of his policy as "compromise with all parties in the attempt to convert into accomplices both friends and enemies."

            Accomplices! That is the word! His great art has lain in finding accomplices for his autocracy, native and foreign, honest and dishonest, conscious and unconscious. And he became a master in this art, not only through inborn astuteness, not only through conviction that the end justified the means, but through the extraordinary personal magnetism to which every one who has come in contact with him bears witness. That he is a born Master and chieftain there can be no doubt. He has all the makings of a great man — except greatness.

            But, in addition to the men who can be bought, there are always a few who can not be bought, and many who are not worth buying. With these the Dictator has dealt, and suffered his instruments to deal, remorselessly. It is related that when an interviewer once said to him, " I suppose you have many enemies, Mr. President?" his reply was, " I had." I do not vouch for the anecdote; but it is by no means improbable.

Death as an "Intelligent Ally"

            " Death," says Sr. de Zayas, " has been 'a most powerful ally of General Diaz. Every one who has crossed his path or who had the power to oppose him has .fallen by death. . . . This does not mean that I suspect General Diaz of having aided in the disappearance of those men. . . . Death has come of its own accord as an intelligent and opportune ally; that is all." The odd thing is that in three conspicuous cases — the cases of the Dictator's most formidable rivals and opponents — the "intelligent ally" should have operated, not in the form of disease or even of accident, but through the assassin's knife or bullet. This fact is absolutely undoubted. General García de la Cadena is believed to have been actually plotting against the Dictator. He came by his end in the State of Zacatecas, nobody quite knows how, but certainly by violence and certainly without process of law. General Ignacio Martinez was living as a political refugee at Laredo, Texas, and was attacking the Diaz government in the press. He was assassinated by a negro, who, it is said, immediately crossed the frontier. Finally, General Ramón Corona, one of the heroes of the French war, " to whose epic figure," says Madero, "the eyes of the lovers of liberty were anxiously turned," was stabbed one fine evening by a low-class Indian, said to have been of unsound mind; but, as the police killed him practically on the spot, I do not know by what inquisition the state of his mind was ascertained. If the Dictator was neither directly nor indirectly concerned in these three murders, one can, only say that his ally, Death, did not show the intelligence with which Sr. de Zayas credits it; for it made him the innocent victim of a most remarkable coincidence.

Belem and San Juan de Ulua

            And these are only conspicuous instances of the "drastic" methods by which Diaz has kept his supremacy unassailed. "Disappearances" have been terribly frequent. The slightest symptom of insurgence against his "solely sovereign sway and masterdom" — whether in the press, by public meeting, or by private organization —has been ruthlessly suppressed. The incident which made a politician, and finally a rebel, of Francisco Madero, was the murderous attack upon a peaceful and orderly procession at Monterey on April 2 (the Porfirist festival), 1903. Without any warning, the demonstrators were mown down by bullets in front of the Ayuntamiento of the capital city of the State of Nuevo Leon. Diaz, of course, is not personally responsible for all such incidents. This particular one is commonly laid to the charge of General Reyes, then Governor of the State. But the whole repressive machine has been perfected and kept in action by Diaz and no one else. He has either captured or crushed not only every form of opposition, but every attempt at political organization or education. Not long ago a Club Organizador del Partido Democratico was formed in Mexico City, only to fall into such complete subservience that its initials, C. O. D. P. D., came to be interpreted, Como Ordena Don Porfirio Diaz —" As Don Porfirio Diaz decrees." But it was no laughing matter to incur the suspicion or enmity of Don Porfirio or his henchmen. Before you knew where you were, you found yourself in Belem, the terrible prison of Mexico City, or, it may be, consigned without any trial to the dungeons of San Juan de Ulua, the fortress island in the sweltering harbor of Vera Cruz.

            Belem is admitted, even by the most ardent partizans of the dictatorship, to be a blot on its

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fair name. "We call it the Mexican Chicago," a Mexican said to me. "Why?" " Because there are 5,500 people in one block" — and of these a large proportion are political prisoners. It is simply an old convent (the name means Bethlehem) scarcely, if at all, reconstructed to serve its present purpose. It has been described to me by men who have passed through it; and the condition of overcrowding, together with the absolutely medieval lack of any tolerable sanitation, would be incredible if one had not similar evidence as to the state of the prisons in the mother country of Mexico — Spain. It is things like this that make one a little impatient of the "benevolent autocrat" legend. Every time he drove from his house in the Calle Cadena to his summer palace at Chapultepec, Diaz must have passed close to Belem. He must have known that hundreds of men, whose only crime was hostility to his rule, were penned in verminous and putrid halls or galleries, at such close quarters that the legs of one row of sleepers, when stretched at full length, dovetailed, so to speak, with the legs of the opposite row. He must, or ought to, have known that the jailers enriched themselves by pocketing one third of the allowance of six cents a day made for the food of the prisoners. He must have known that a word from him would alter all this; and for more than a quarter of a century, while his press agents, official or unofficial, were vaunting the benignity and enlightenment of his rule, that word remained unspoken. There is a sort of hypocrisy in this with which one finds it difficult to deal tenderly.

Liberty of the Press

            If you want information as to Belem, you have only to apply to any liberal, and not overcautious, journalist. The following little incident amused me a good deal. I had been asking a journalist friend whether the government gave him much trouble. "Oh, no!" he declared, "no trouble at all. Now and then they would remonstrate against some item which was actually untrue; but in the expression of opinion, so long as you were reasonably decent and discreet, no one interfered with you." I parted from my friend at the corner of the Alameda, and went toward my hotel. I had not left him three minutes when, in a side street, a notice written in chalk on a blackboard attracted my attention. It ran thus: '

DIARIO DEL HOGAR

April 27

            To-day at 1.30 P.M. the seals which the police had placed upon our offices, by order of the Third Correctional Court, were taken off. The paper will reappear on Monday, May 1, advocating the same political program as before.

            I bought the issue of Monday, May 1, and found in it a lively account of the editor's experiences during some months in Belem. The reason for the suppression of the paper, I had not time to discover; but it did not greatly matter, for in all probability the alleged reason was something trifling and irrelevant. It was part of the Diaz policy to proceed against an offending paper on some side issue, some matter of personal and private libel, as to which Mexican law is absurdly strict. By this means the paper can be suspended or suppressed — the whole printing plant is sometimes thrown into the street — while the editor has not the advantage of figuring as a martyr to political principle. Sometimes the unwary journalist is provisionally released, and allowed to carry on his calling during good behavior, with a prosecution suspended over his head. At other times he goes to Belem for an indefinite term, there to meditate, under conditions to which sackcloth and ashes would be vastly preferable, upon the blessings of a benevolent despotism.

The "Ley Fuga"

            Compared with the lot of the prisoners, the fate of victims of the ley fuga — the law of flight — seems almost enviable. The ley fuga is not really a law, but a convenient custom whereby any person who, having been arrested, attempts to escape, may then and there be shot down, without further ceremony. It may be said that in any country a prisoner who attempts to escape from an armed guard is apt to have a bullet sent after him; but the allegation is that in Mexico prisoners are habitually tempted or compelled to run away, in order that they may be disposed of, under the ley fuga, without any formality of trial or inquest. The fact is undisputed; but there are naturally no statistics to show how commonly the ley fuga is put in force. People who are loud in their praise of the rurales will at the same time tell you that this licensed murder is an every-day affair. " I heard a man once," said a young English engineer who had spent most of his life in Mexico, "appeal against a sentence of sixty days' imprisonment inflicted on him by a local comisario. 'Very well,' said the comisario, 'then I shall have to send you to Monclova under guard' — and he ordered a rural to be called. On hearing this, however, the man promptly withdrew his appeal and accepted his sentence. When the rural presently appeared, and heard what he had been wanted for, 'Oh,

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that fellow!' he said. 'He's not worth taking to Monclova!' He evidently agreed with the prisoner that there would probably have been an accident on the way." At the same time, this Englishman declared the rurales to be a splendid body of men, second only to the Northwestern Mounted Police of Canada. Other people, more squeamish as to methods, call them "Porfirio's Cossacks." But it is not only the rurales who can, and do, deal expeditiously with captives who are "not worth" imprisonment or trial. The ordinary policeman carries, in addition to his club, a revolver and belt of cartridges. Madero's comment on the ley fuga is that, established for the putting down of bandits, it has been extended to the getting rid of political opponents. "How many infamies," he says, "have been buried at the cross-roads! How many martyrs immolated to their love of liberty!"

The Hated "Jefe Politico"

            It is manifest that a country where such customs prevail is not a civilized country. The lives and liberties of all Mexicans, but especially of those who have neither money nor influence, are always at the mercy of arbitrary power. The great despotism at the top has ramified into thousands of petty despotisms, from whose malice and extortion no one is secure. " Beneath the national government," we are told, "are the 27 State governors, with their 295 jefes politicos or prefects, and 1,798 municipal presidents." It would be absurd to say that among those officials there are no just and humane men; but, as a matter of fact, the local outbreaks from which, during the past six months, scarcely a State of the Union has been free, were almost all the result of pent-up rage against the tyranny of the jefes politicos. Many of these gentlemen had long scores to pay off —and have duly paid them. There was no appeal against their tyrannies, save to the Dictator; and the Dictator heard only those appeals that were backed by a member of his ring, or by a great corporation, or by an ambassador.

            It is urged in defense of Diaz that this is the form of rule which the Mexicans understand and expect: that, in other words, the instinct to tyrannize and be tyrannized over runs in their blood. "Every Mexican has to have another Mexican to kick," an old resident said to me. Even if we take this statement with the necessary discount, we can not but see that no lasting government can be built on such a principle — least of all in the present age of the world, when, for good or ill, ideals of humanity and social justice are abroad in the air, and can not be silenced or suppressed. I said, and it was true, that Diaz had no taste for the futile effort to keep out the tide of material progress with a mop; but he has done his best to keep out moral progress with a revolver, and the effort has proved, in the long run, not only futile, but disastrous.

Diaz and Education

            In examining his policy, one sometimes wonders whether he had not actually come to believe himself immortal, so little preparation did he make for what was to come after. If he realized that he must one day die, and if he had the good of the nation truly at heart, one of two courses was clearly imposed on him. He must either educate the people to govern itself, or educate a successor to govern the people. The true wisdom, indeed, would have been to adopt both courses — to begin the education of the people, and to educate a successor to carry it on. Diaz carefully did neither the one thing nor the other.

            To education in the narrow sense of the word he was always doing lip-homage; but it is very doubtful whether he really cared for it. Certain it is that his thirty years of power did little to reduce illiteracy. The census of 1900 showed eighty-four per cent of analfabetos throughout the country, and sixty-two per cent even in the Federal District. Since then some advance has probably been made, but nothing of importance. The difficulties of popular education in a sparsely peopled mountainous country are no doubt great, especially when we consider that about thirty-eight per cent of the population are of pure Indian race, and that perhaps about half of these speak no Spanish. But, making every allowance for these difficulties, we can not but feel that Diaz has done little more than the irreducible minimum for the cause he professed to have so much at heart.

            In the United States about one fifth of the whole population are enrolled school children; in Mexico, according to statistics of 1906, only about one twenty-fifth. And even these figures are probably quite deceptive. When a new Minister of Education took office some months ago, one of the first things he did was to call for the pay-roll of teachers in the Federal District; whereupon a long and imposing list was presented to him. "Now," he said, "I want within three days to have every one of these teachers presented to me" — but those who could be whipped up in answer to his summons were only about half of those who figured on the list.

            As for education in the larger sense of the

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term,— political organization, free discussion, and so forth,— we have already seen how Diaz encouraged that. Death, Belem, or exile was the reward of those who showed any enthusiasm for it.

Limantour, Corral, and Reyes

            The second course — that of forming and developing a competent successor — was even less to the Dictator's taste than the first. Competence was, in his eyes, scarcely less criminal than ambition. Only one man of first-rate ability has remained in favor with Diaz for many years in succession: the great Minister of Finance, Jose Yves Limantour. Sr. Limantour is a man of rare distinction and of very unusual mental power. But, for one reason or another, he has always declared himself wholly averse from the idea of ever becoming President. Some people say that he is ineligible under the Constitution, on account of his foreign (French) parentage. I have his own authority for stating that this is not so; but I have also his own authority for declaring that under no circumstances would he accept the Presidency. "I am an administrator," he says, "not a politician." Sr. Limantour apart, Diaz has suffered no one to make a name for himself in politics. Sr. Corral, whom he practically named as his successor by having him elected Vice-President, would simply have been a vastly inferior Diaz. When Governor of Sonora, he was not unpopular, as governors go; but he was largely responsible for the Yaqui scandal, and he was Minister of the Interior at the time of the Orizaba massacre. General Bernardo Reyes became sufficiently prominent as a possible candidate for the Presidency to merit banishment (under the guise of a military mission) to Europe. He has now returned, and the immediate future of the country must depend largely upon the question whether he chooses to work with or against Madero; for he has undoubtedly a considerable following. Of young men one hears nothing at all. "The whole trouble might have been avoided," someone said, " if Diaz had only put in as Vice-President, instead of Corral, some younger man who should be acceptable to the nation." "What younger man would you suggest?" I asked. "I really don't know," was the answer. I repeated the question to perhaps a dozen different people, Mexicans and foreigners; and the answer was always the same — they knew of no one of the younger generation who had made a sufficient mark to be a possible nominee for the Vice-Presidency. That is an inevitable result of personal rule such as that of Diaz. Even if ability be not violently repressed, it has no room for development. In a Chamber of Deputies of which the elections are a farce and the debates an empty formality, how should power make itself felt? In a ministry "run" by a martinet, how should originality develop? Well might Bolivar say: "The nation whose existence depends on a single man can have no enduring polity."

Is Madero the Man of the Future?

            Where, then, lies the hope for the future? I cannot tell, unless it be in Francisco I. Madero. Judging him by his book, I take him to be a sincere patriot and a man of enlightened intelligence. Is he also a strong man? That remains to be seen; but some things reported of him point in that direction. He knows very well that the salvation of Mexico lies in the gradual introduction of humanity and justice into the workings of the administrative machinery; the gradual uplifting, both material and spiritual, of the masses of the people; and the gradual approximation of political facts to constitutional theory. To this end, it is probable that not only the facts but the theory ought to be altered; the approximation should be effected from both ends. But it is clear that, so long as facts and theory are at heaven-wide variance, the Constitution is nothing but a weapon in the hands of revolutionists.

            Mexico is at this moment as prolific in theoretical constitution-builders as was Paris in 1790. The legislature has already passed rigorous laws against reelection, not only to the Presidency, but to State governorships. It was even proposed that no relative of a President, within the fourth degree, should ever be eligible for the office — an enactment evidently aimed at the Dictator's nephew, Felix Diaz. The restriction of the franchise to those who can read and write has been widely canvassed; and it has been calculated that, excluding women, minors, etc., this would reduce the whole voting population of the country to a little over half a million, and would practically mean that Mexico City would rule Mexico. Another proposal is that Congress should be elected by universal suffrage, but that an educational qualification should be required of voters for individual office-holder, such as the President and the State governors. It is pointed out that such an enactment would have the effect of making all parties keen to promote education. But the trouble in Mexico is that, for the present, there are no political parties, no Republicans or Democrats, no Conservatives or Radicals, but only the adherents of individual men — Porfiristas, Reyistas, Dehesistas, Maderistas.

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Yet I do not see why, with a government acting honestly up to the principle of "effective suffrage," parties should not rapidly develop. I am told that there are signs of the crystallization of a Clerical-Conservative party; and a Socialist, a "land-for-the-people," party is already in existence in the Flores-Magon group. Should Madero come to power, he would find this hostile "extreme left" ready to hand.

            A just, humane, and strong man — that is what Mexico requires. Is Madero he ? Or look we for another? That is the great question. Whoever he may be, he will have no light task before him; for the moment he attempts reform, he will run up against powerful vested interests, and there will assuredly be counter-revolutions afoot. Such a legacy of wrong as Diaz leaves behind him can not be set right in a day.

The American in Mexico

            And what, meanwhile, is the position of American capital and American lives? It is not quite an agreeable one. No Mexican government that one can with any probability foresee would be actively hostile to the foreigner; but under no probable government can he reasonably look forward to such a good time as he has enjoyed under Diaz. On the fall of a tyranny there will naturally follow a tidal wave of patriotism; and to patriotism it can not be agreeable to see a country so permeated by foreign, and especially American, power and influence as Mexico assuredly is. The central district of the capital is almost as much an American as a Mexican city. The new and splendid Post Office bears official evidence to the conquest by infiltration, in the quadruple division of its letter-slits. They are labeled: "Federal District" — "Interior" — "United States" —"Exterior": thus giving the United States an intermediate place, neither within nor without the country, which figures the situation very exactly. During my stay in the capital I was a guest of the (American) University Club; and while I saw with admiration the tall, square-shouldered, energetic, efficient young fellows by whom it was peopled, I could not but wonder how I should feel, were I a Mexican, on seeing this masterful race descend in swarms upon my country.

            But, given settled government, all may be well. The danger lies in a long period of unsettlement. Already the American government has shown a great deal of patience. During the crumbling away of the Diaz rule there have been more unredressed wrongs and outrages than the American public perhaps realizes. They are, in my judgment, what people have to expect who put their trust in power dissociated from integrity and humanity. But there might possibly occur some great outrage, such as no nation could overlook; and then it is hard to see how a terrible disaster could be avoided. The position of foreign, and especially American, residents is certainly none too secure. They are not loved by the masses, and they have (broadly speaking) no friends of their own class who would stand by them in case of necessity. Really cordial social relations between Americans and Mexicans do not exist — Mexican social habits, and especially the position and prejudices of Mexican women, absolutely forbid them. Thus Mexico can only be described as a potentially hostile country, which some comparatively trifling occurrence might easily cause to break out in a blaze of active hostility. "I am a bear on Mexico," an old resident said to me — a man who was assuredly no alarmist by temperament. His wife and children were in the United States.

            Doubtless an American army could march through Mexico as a ship sails through the sea; but the sea would close up behind it. Unless Mexico had an ally* who could prevent a blockade of her coasts, the actual war might not be a very long one; for Mexico would soon run out of the ammunition required by modern rifles. But what could follow such a conquest? I am sure that no sane man in the United States contemplates or desires any aggression upon Mexico. The danger lies in occurrences that might absolutely force it; and to avoid such occurrences I suggest that the United States should, with all its power, directed by all its tact, support any Mexican government that seemed to have the good of the people really at heart, even if such support meant the sacrifice or postponement of immediate pecuniary "interests."

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* There is no reason to think that the Diaz government seriously coquetted with Japan; but it is certain that the Mexican masses look with eagerness in that direction.