[Footnote 29:  Of Aberdeen, North Carolina, the Ambassador’s brother.]

[Footnote 30:  Of Pinehurst, North Carolina, the Ambassador’s eldest son.]

[Footnote 31:  Mr. and Mrs. Francis B. Sayre, son-in-law and daughter of President Wilson, at that time on their honeymoon trip in Europe.]

[Footnote 32:  Mr. Robert N. Page, the Ambassador’s brother, was at this time a Congressman from North Carolina.]

[Footnote 33:  This is from a letter to President Wilson.]

CHAPTER VI

“POLICY” AND “PRINCIPLE” IN MEXICO

I

The last days of February, 1913, witnessed one of those sanguinary scenes in Mexico which for generations had accompanied changes in the government of that distracted country.  A group of revolutionists assailed the feeble power of Francisco Madero and virtually imprisoned that executive and his forces in the Presidential Palace.  The Mexican army, whose most influential officers were General Blanquet and General Victoriano Huerta, was hastily summoned to the rescue of the Government; instead of relieving the besieged officials, however, these generals turned their guns upon them, and so assured the success of the uprising.  The speedy outcome of these transactions was the assassination of President Madero and the seizure of the Presidency by General Huerta.  Another outcome was the presentation to Page of one of the most delicate problems in the history of Anglo-American relations.

At almost any other time this change in the Mexican succession would have caused only a momentary disturbance.  There was nothing new in the violent overthrow of government in Latin-America; in Mexico itself no president had ever risen to power except by revolution.  The career of Porfirio Diaz, who had maintained his authority for a third of a century, had somewhat obscured this fundamental fact in Mexican politics, but Diaz had dominated Mexico for seven presidential terms, not because his methods differed from the accepted methods of his country, but because he was himself an executive of great force and a statesman of genius, and could successfully hold his own against any aspiring antagonist.  The civilized world, including the United States, had long since become reconciled to this situation as almost a normal one.  In recognizing momentarily successful adventurers, Great Britain and the United States had never considered such details as justice or constitutionalism:  the legality of the presidential title had never been the point at issue; the only question involved was whether the successful aspirant actually controlled the country, whether he had established a state of affairs that approximately represented order, and whether he could be depended upon to protect life and property.  During the long dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz, however, certain events had taken place which had awakened