The Mexicans are the last large section of the earth’s population thus left to rule themselves in savagery.  Hence the rest of the world has watched them with eagerness.  Europe repeatedly reminded the United States that by her Monroe Doctrine she had assumed the duty of keeping order in America.  At last she felt compelled to interfere.  The picture of those days of anarchy is here sketched by two eye-witnesses, an Englishman and an American, both fresh from the scene of action.

EDWIN EMERSON

There is a saying in Mexico that it is much easier to be a successful general than a successful president.  Inasmuch as almost all Mexican presidents during the hundred years since Mexico became a Republic, owed their presidency to successful generalship, this saying is significant.  At all events, no Mexican general who won his way into the National Palace by his military prowess ever won his way out with credit to himself or to his country.

General Victoriano Huerta, Mexico’s latest Interim-President, during the first few months that followed his overthrow of the Madero Government found out to his own cost how much harder it is to rule a people than an army.

As a matter of fact, General Huerta was pushed into his interim-presidency before he really had a fair opportunity to learn how to command an army.  At the time he was so suddenly made Chief Magistrate of Mexico he was not commanding the Mexican army, but was merely a recently appointed major-general who happened to command that small fraction of the regular army at the capital which was supposed to have remained loyal to President Madero and his constitutional government.  Huerta had been appointed by President Madero to the supreme command of the loyal forces at the capital, numbering barely three thousand soldiers, only a few days before Madero’s fall.  Even if he had not turned traitor to his commander-in-chief, as he did in the end, Huerta’s command of the loyal troops during the ten days’ struggle at the capital preceding the fall of the constitutional government could not be described as anything but a dismal failure.

Before considering General Huerta’s qualifications as a President, one should know something of his career as a soldier.  During the last few years it has repeatedly fallen to my lot to follow General Huerta in the field, so that I have had a fair chance to view some of his soldierly qualities at close hand.  I accompanied General Huerta during his campaign through Chihuahua, in 1912, and was present at his famous Battle of Bachimba, near Chihuahua City, on July 3, 1912—­the one decisive victory won by General Huerta against the rebel forces of Pascual Orozco.  Before this campaign I was in Cuernavaca, in the State of Morelos, during the time when General Huerta had his headquarters there in his campaign against Zapata’s bandit hordes in that State after the fall of General Diaz’s government.