WILLIAM CAROL[1]

[Footnote 1:  Reproduced in condensed form from The World’s Work by the kind permission of Doubleday, Page & Co.]

In order to understand the situation in Mexico, it is necessary to get firmly in our minds that there are in reality two Mexicos.  One may be called American Mexico and the other Mexican Mexico.

The representative of the new, half-formed northern or American Mexico was Francisco Madero—­rich, educated, well mannered, honest, and idealistically inclined.  The representative of the old Mexico is Huerta—­“rough, plain, old Indian,” as he describes himself, pugnacious, crafty, ignorant of political amenities, without understanding of any rule except the rule of blood and powder.

By the law of 1894 Diaz changed the character of the land titles in Mexico.  Many smaller landowners, unable to prove their titles under the new system, lost their holdings, which in large measure eventually fell into the hands of a few rich men.  In the feudal south this did not cause so much disturbance.  But in the north the growing middle class bitterly resented it.  Madero became the spokesman of this discontent.  In his books and in his program of reform, “the plan of San Luis Potosi,” he attacked the Diaz regime.  And then in 1910 he joined the rebel band organized by Pascual Orozco in the mountains of Chihuahua.  With his weakened army Diaz was unable to cope with this revolution, and in October, 1911, Madero became President.

The country was then at peace, except for the band of robbers led by Zapata in the provinces of Morelos and Guerrero.  These are and have been the most atrocious of the many bandits with which Mexico is infested.  No outrage or barbarity known to savages have they left untried.  Madero attempted to buy them off, but to no avail.  He then sent military forces against them, one column commanded by General Huerta, but with no success.

In the mean time, Pascual Orozco, who emerged from the Madero revolution as a great war hero in his own State, was given no post of responsibility under the new Government, but was left as commander of the militia in the State of Chihuahua.  The adherents of the old Diaz regime took this opportunity to win him over to their side, for Orozco’s fighting was done purely for profit, not for principle.  A reactionary movement, with Orozco at its head, broke out in February, 1912.  Five thousand men were quickly got together.  The Madero Administration—­a Northern Administration in the Southern country—­was not fully organized, and, with the army not yet rehabilitated, found itself seriously embarrassed.  Had Orozco been an intelligent and competent leader he probably could have marched straight through to Mexico City at that time, as the only governmental troops that were available to fight him were only about sixteen hundred, which he defeated and nearly annihilated at Rellano in Chihuahua.  Their commander, General Gonzalez Salas, Madero’s war minister, committed suicide after the defeat.