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.

It is rather the cry nowadays that men’s best work is done before forty; and even their good work no later than sixty; but among endless exceptions General Diaz must take high rank.

His real career began at forty-six.  Up to that time he had been an officer in a somewhat disorganized army, and his ambition at the outset never soared beyond a colonelcy.

He was nearly fifty when he entered Mexico City at the head of a revolutionary force.  Romance and adventure were behind him, although personal peril still dogged his steps.  He had to forget that he was a soldier, and to be born again as leader and politician, a maker and not a destroyer.  In that capacity he had absolutely no experience of public affairs, but such as he had gained in a smaller way in early years spent in Oaxaca.  Yet Diaz became a ruler, and a diplomat, and assumed the courtly manners of a prince.