A hundred instances could be cited of the automobile’s aid to the farm.  One will suffice.  In times of harvest, when a big gang is at work, the breakdown of a thresher will stop operations for a whole day, if the farmer has to drive to town behind a horse to get needed parts.  With an automobile, he can dash in and out in a few hours.

No one expects the automobile to replace the horse on the farm.  But for work that the horse can not do efficiently—­such as the quick transit of milk, butter, and garden products to the markets—­the motor-car has a future of wide utility.  Incidentally, the farmer may be the first to solve the fuel problem, for by means of cooperative distilling he could produce denatured alcohol for almost nothing.

The more you go into the study of the automobile on the farm, the bigger becomes its significance.  In the United States, four hundred and twenty-five million acres of land are uncultivated, largely on account of their inaccessibility.  The motor-car will make them more accessible.  Through the wide use of automobiles by the farmer we shall get, in time, that most valuable agency for prosperity, the good road.

One emerges from an investigation of the automobile industry in wonder over its expansion, and with admiration for the men behind it.  Clear-cut youth, fresh vigor, compelling action galvanize it.  Yet what seems to be a miracle at the end of less than ten years of growth may only be the prelude to a vaster era.

Meanwhile, each day records a new chapter of its triumphant progress.

THE DOWNFALL OF DIAZ

MEXICO PLUNGES INTO REVOLUTION

A.D. 1911

MRS. E.A.  TWEEDIE

DOLORES BUTTERFIELD

On May 25, 1911, Porfirio Diaz resigned the Presidency of Mexico, under the compulsion of a revolution headed by Francisco Madero.  This act ended an era, the Diaz era, in Mexican history.  Diaz had been President for over thirty years.  He had found Mexico an impoverished barbarism; he raised it to be a wealthy and at least outwardly civilized state.  Some able critics, even among Europeans, had declared that Diaz, “the grand old man,” was the greatest leader of the past century.  All Mexicans honored him.  But unfortunately for his fame he grew too old:  he outlived his wisdom and his power.

Of the downfall of such a man there must naturally be conflicting views.  We give here the story from the pathetic Diaz side by a well-known English writer upon Mexico, Mrs. Tweedie.  Then we give the warm picture of Madero’s heroic struggle against tyranny, as it appeared to Dolores Butterfield, a young lady brought up in Mexico, but driven thence by the more recent revolution which resulted in Madero’s death.

MRS. E. A. TWEEDIE