Between anarchy and anarchy the history of unhappy Mexico is spanned for the space of a generation by the colossal figure of the soldier-president, Diaz (CONSTABLE).  Mr. DAVID HANNAY, writing with exquisite literary workmanship in the series of biographies entitled collectively Makers of the Nineteenth Century, presents this typically “strong” man as neither hero nor villain, but as a human being with human limitations, even more as a Mexican with the characteristics of a Mexican.  Amongst a populace hopelessly divided by race, untrained in self-government and cursed with a natural twist for lawlessness only equalled by its hatred of work, Diaz stands for a tyranny certainly, but for a unified orderly tyranny, preferable, one might think, to a myriad petty outlawries.  If little of the country’s wealth found its way beyond the narrowest of circles during his long control, and if certain Indian tribes were shamefully enslaved—­a fact which is neither denied nor condoned—­still railways and harbours did get themselves built and the dictator himself lived a life of uncorrupt simplicity.  He has been blamed for failure to establish enduringly the civilisation that Europe thought bad been attained, but on this the author’s verdict is an unhesitating acquittal.  Only a god could have done better, he thinks, and, in a series of illuminating analyses of the material to be moulded he shows how anything more than a superficial improvement was humanly impossible.  Until that day of absorption in the United States which Mr. HANNAY considers fortunately inevitable, Mexico has no chance, he maintains, of even a moderately good government except under a firm dictatorship; and so he renders no small homage to the man who, all his failures notwithstanding, did for a time lift his country from the anarchy to which in his old age it reverted.  Sober reading in all conscience, but for the manner of the writing one can have nothing but joyous praise.

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His own modesty must preclude Mr. Punch from indicating those chapters in Soldier Men (LANE) that appear to him the most worthy of praise.  But of course, if you specially want to know, a glance at the preliminary acknowledgments ...  Anyhow, parental prejudice apart, these studies of military life, mostly on the Egyptian Front, form a sufficiently entertaining and interesting volume.  In this war of many fronts and facets, literature seems a little to have deserted the desert; it is therefore good that a writer so well equipped as “YEO” should tell us a little of what our soldiers there are doing for the cause, the special variety of beastliness that they are enduring (to read the chapter called “Plagues of Egypt” is enough to make one seek out an English wasp and embrace it with tears of affection), and the courage and humour that support them in their task.  Something more than this, too; the wholly illogical and baffling humanity that—­one