Let it be said to Diaz’s credit that he did try, in a measure, at first to better those conditions.  Hence the public schools which, though inadequate for the scattered rural population, have accomplished much in the cities.  He also attempted years ago a division of the lands, but dropped it when he saw that the great landowners were stronger than he and that to persist might cost him the Presidency.

It was natural and inevitable that a Government in which there was never any change or movement should stagnate and become corrupt.  Porfirio Diaz was not a President, but, in all save the name, an absolute monarch, and inevitably there formed about his throne a cordon of men as unpatriotic and self-interested as he may have been patriotic and disinterested—­as to a great extent he undeniably was.  These men were the Cientificos.

The term is, of course, not their own.  It was applied to them by the Anti-reelectionists, meaning that they were scientific grafters and exploiters.  The full-fledged Cientifico was at once a tremendous landholder and high government official.  To illustrate, the land of the State of Chihuahua is almost entirely owned by the Terrazas family.  In the days of Diaz, Don Luis Terrazas was always the governor, being further reenforced by his relative, Enrique C. Creel, high in the Diaz ministry.  In Sonora the land was held by Ramon Corral, Luis Torres, and Rafael Izabal.  These three gentlemen, who were called “The Trinity,” used to rotate in the government of the state until Corral was made vice-president, when Torres and Izabal took turn about until the death of the latter shortly before the Madero revolution.  In every state there was either one perpetual governor or a combine of them.

Thus in each state a small group of men were the absolute masters politically, economically, and industrially.  They made and unmade the laws at their pleasure.  For instance, Terrazas imposed a prohibitory tax upon cattle which forced the small owners to dispose of their stock, which he, being the only purchaser, bought at his own price, after which he repealed the law.  They adjusted taxation to suit themselves, assessing their own huge estates at figures nothing short of ridiculous, while levying heavily upon the small farmer, and especially upon enterprise and improvements.  They practised peonage, though peonage is contrary to the Constitution of the Republic, to the Federal laws, and, in many cases, to the laws of the separate states as well.  They drew public salaries for perverting the government to their private benefit and enrichment; and as the dictator grew older and surrendered to his satellites more and more of his once absolute power, the conditions became so intolerable, and the tyranny and greed of the Cientificos so shameless and unbridled (infinitely more so in the southern than in the northern states), that it would have been a reversal of the history of the world if there had been no revolution.