Thus closes one of the most wild and romantic episodes of the world’s history—­a peasant boy who became a soldier, a general who became a President—­a President who became a great autocrat, who raised a country from obscurity to greatness, and was finally driven from power by the very people he had educated, and to whom he had brought vast blessings.

The great Diaz in his eighty-first year has passed from power, the power he used so well.  Verily a moving spectacle from first to last.

DOLORES BUTTERFIELD[1]

[Footnote 1:  Reproduced by permission from the North American Review.]

In contemplating the present situation in Mexico there is a tendency of late to deplore the Madero revolution and the overthrow of Diaz, and to overlook the fact that the Diaz regime itself not only made and forced, by its political abuses, the revolution that overthrew it, but, by its economic abuses, prepared the country for the anarchy now rife in it; and also that it is the very same ring of men who surrounded Diaz and finally rendered his rule unbearable who are now financing and fomenting the present rebellion against a Government not in sympathy with them nor subservient to their interests.

Porfirio Diaz attained the presidency of Mexico thirty-five years ago by overthrowing Lerdo de Tejada.  He put an end to brigandage, which was at that time wide-spread.  Such bandits as he could not buy he exterminated.  His political opponents he also bought or exterminated, so that without the slightest disturbance to the national peace he could be unanimously reelected whenever his term expired.  Out of bankruptcy he established credit; he put up schools; he invited foreign capital into his country and made it possible for foreign capital to go in; and so he gradually built up a material progress which won him the name of “nation-builder.”  There were railroads and telegraphs; the cities were graced with beautiful edifices, with theaters and parks, with electricity and asphalt.  There was the appearance of a civilization and progress, which, considering the time in which it was compassed, was indeed marvelous.

But all this was only a shell and a semblance.  The economic condition of the Mexican lower classes was not touched—­the process of “nation-building” seemed not to include them.  In the shadow of a modern civilization stalked poverty and ignorance worthy of the Middle Ages.  And it was notorious that in the capital city itself, under the very eyes of the central Government, was where the very worst conditions and the most glaring extremes of poverty and wealth were to be seen.  On the one hand, splendid paseos lined with magnificent palaces, where, in their automobiles, the pleasure-seeking women of the rich displayed their raiment worth thousands of dollars; and, on the other, streets filled with beggars, their clothes literally dropping off them in filthy rags, reeking with the typhus which for years has been endemic in the City of Mexico.