The Great Events by Famous Historians [Volumes 1-14]

It is one of the saddest episodes in the history of great rulers, and at the same time one of the most important in the history of a country. Mexico, which has pushed so brilliantly ahead in finance, industry, and agriculture, has still lagged behind in political development. The man who made a great nation out of half-breeds and chaos was so sure of his own position, his own strength, and I may say his own motives, that he did not encourage antagonism at the polls, and "free voting" remained a name only.

A German author has said that all rulers become obsessed with the passion of rule. They lose their balance, clearness of sight, judgment, and only desire to rule, rule, rule! He was able to quote many examples. I thought of him and his theory when following, as closely as one is able to do six thousand miles away, the recent course of events in Mexico. Would he in a new edition add General Diaz to his list?

Diaz has reached a great age. On the 15th September, 1910, he celebrated his eightieth birthday. He has ruled Mexico, with one brief interval of four years, since 1876. For thirty-five years, therefore, with one short break, the country has known no other President; and Madero, who has laid him low, was a man more or less put into office by Diaz himself. A new generation of Mexicans has grown up under the rule of Diaz. Time after time he has been reelected with unanimity, no other candidate being nominated—nor even suggested. Is it to be wondered at that, by the time his seventh term expired in 1910, he should have at last come to regard himself as indispensable?

That he was so persuaded permits of no doubt. "He would remain in office so long as he thought Mexico required his services," he said in the course of the first abortive negotiations for peace—before the capture of the town of Juarez by the insurrectionists, and the surrender of the Republican troops under General Navarro took the actual settlement out of his hand.

It was a fatal mistake, and it has shrouded in deep gloom the close of a career of unexampled brilliancy, both in war and statesmanship. The Spanish-American Republics have produced no man who will compare with Porfirio Diaz. Simon Bolivar for years fought the decaying power of Spain, and to him what are now the Republics of Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Peru owe their liberation. But Diaz has been more than a soldier, and his great achievement in the redemption of modern Mexico from bankruptcy and general decay completely overshadows his successes in the field during the ceaseless struggles of his earlier years.

Had he retired in 1910 he would have done so with honor, and every hostile voice in Mexico would have been stilled. All would have been forgotten in remembrance of the immense debt that his country owed him. He would have stood out as the great historic figure of a glorious era in the national annals. It was the first time he had broken his word with the people. Staying too long, he has been driven from office by a movement of ideas, the strength of which it is evident that he never realized until too late, and by a rebellion that in the days of his vigorous autocracy he would have stamped out with his heel.

It is a sad picture to look on, especially when I turn to that other one of the simple palace-home in Mexico City, with the fine old warrior, with dilating nostrils like a horse at the covert side, his face aglow, his eyes flashing as he told me of bygone battles, escapes from imprisonment and death, and deeds of wild adventure and romance. These inspiriting recollections he freely gave me for the "authentic biography" which he had given me permission to write. Up to that time he had refused that favor to every one; and in spite of his grateful recognition of the "honesty and veracity" of the volume I had written about his country five years before, he was long in giving his consent. "I have only done what I thought right," he said, "and it is my country and my ministers who have really made Mexico what she is." In the days of his strength, corruption was unknown in his country, and even now no finger can point at him. He retires a poor man, to live on his wife's little fortune. Diaz had the right to be egotistical, but he was modesty itself.

Yet he had risen from a barefoot lad of humble birth and little education to the dictatorship of one of the most turbulent states in the world, and this by powers of statesmanship for which, owing to want of opportunity, he had shown no aptitude before he reached middle life. Before that he seemed but a good soldier, true as steel, brave, hardy, resourceful in the field, and nothing more. It was not until he was actually President, when nearing fifty, that his gifts for government asserted themselves. Such late developments are rare, although Cromwell was forty before he made any mark. Chatham, again, was fifty before he was heard outside his own circle, and yet a few years, barely months, later, the world was at his feet.