Diaz, master of Mexico

Preface

The thrilling story of Porfirio Diaz has been told many times, yet always detached from Mexican history as a whole. The result has been highly confusing, usually misleading; and one has turned away from the tale feeling that modern Mexico has not been explained. In the raw attempt to apply the perfected institutions of Anglo- Saxon civilization to the descendants of the dusky races which inhabited Mexico before the discovery of America by Columbus, the Mexican statesmen of 1824 put the principles of democratic government to a terrible ordeal. Without keeping this experiment in mind, it is quite impossible to realize the profound significance of Diaz's extraordinary career and the importance of his work to all students of statecraft. He was summoned to power from a youth of poverty and obscurity by the necessities of his divided and demoralized country ; and he is as truly a creation of the weakness of his people as the peaceful and progressive Mexico of to-day is largely the product of his strength and common sense. In these times of radical agitation, when sentimental democracy screams its epigrams against the hard, rough, slow work that confronts organized society in all countries, there is much to be learned in the life of this greatest Latin- American leader, from his brilliant, fighting youth to his white old

PREFACE

age, in which he sits the acknowledged master of progress and comparative plenty.

The author has had the advantage of many extended conversations with President Diaz and the other leading men of the Mexican republic. Much has been drawn from the President's private memoirs. Many books and records have been searched and many parts of Mexico visited. All financial statements are to be understood as in Mexican currency.

The object of this work is neither to attack nor to defend, but to explain, the most interesting man of the most misunderstood and misrepresented country in the world.

J. C.

New York, 1910.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. — The Quick and the Dead i

II. — Oppressed Mexico Tries Anglo-Saxon Institutions

Chapter I

Uncovering his soldierly white head, President Diaz approached the tomb of Benito Juarez in the strange little graveyard-pantheon of San Fernando.

In his eightieth year the master and hero of modern Mexico — protagonist of the American hemisphere and inscrutable mystery to students of government — stood with all the grace and strength of an old warrior as he looked into the sculptured face of the immortal Indian lawyer-statesman, under whose leadership in the far valley of Oaxaca he had turned his boyish soul away from priestly ambitions and drawn a sword that was ' not sheathed until the Mexican republic rose at last from its long night of shame, confusion, weakness, and misery to take a place among the honored and trusted nations of the world.

In spite of his years, Porfirio Diaz seemed the incarnation of power and courage.

All about him were the graves and monuments of Mexican leaders — General Guerrero, a soldier of the first struggle for independence, afterwards President, and betrayed to a bloody death by treachery ; Ignacio

Comonfort, also President, murdered in cold blood by Mexican traitors ; General Zaragoza, who drove back the French invaders on the unforgetable Fifth of May ; General Arteaga, slain in cold blood by Maximilian's orders; Generals Miramon and Mejia, executed with Maximilian, when the fall of the Austrian invader's bespangled empire marked the last interference of armed Europe with the republics of America.

The victorious survivor of a half century of wars and treacheries almost unparalleled in human history — with imaginative democracy, monarchy, and ecclesiastical power in a death grapple — the strength and common sense of Diaz had given more than thirty years of peace to his country.

From the faded pink and brown walls of the church of San Fernando, hard by, came a sound of solemn Sabbath chanting, and the sudden clamor of bells above the ancient altars of the Mexican capital echoed harshly among the gray memorials where the maker of a nation communed with its dead past.

His high, wide forehead sloped up to stiff, white hair, and jutted over deep-set, dark, soul-searching eyes — soft eyes, quick, sidewise-darting eyes; formidable, fierce eyes ; friendly, confiding, humorous eyes — and the strong, broad nose, whose sensitive nostrils dilated with every emotion, went well with the tremendous crunch of the wide, powerful jaws, sweeping from large, flat ears, lying close to the head; the massive, square chin, the large, expressive mouth, swept by a crisp, snowy mustache ; the pointed, fighting head, the short, muscular neck, the wide shoulders and deep chest.

There was a magnetic something in the eyes, a tense erectness and dignity in the slender figure, a nervous challenge in the lift of the head, that suggested a virility 2 and tenacity that could defy the strains and shocks of a lifetime of adventures, perils, and temptations.

With a gesture of reverence the venerable leader laid a garland of fresh violets on the marble figure stretched tragically among dusty wreaths and faded ribbons. At that moment the bugles and drums of distant soldiery answered the wild tumult of bells, as though the tribute of Diaz living to Juarez dead had for a moment summoned from the past the struggle between Church and State that for more than fifty years desolated Mexico and reddened its soil with blood. Then the sounds died down and all was quiet in the small national cemetery where patriot and traitor, soldier and statesman, republican and imperialist, lay together *in the earth, indifferent alike to wars, stratagems, or treasons.

There was a time when even Diaz and Juarez were at war. Between the deeds of the one and the theories of the other lay the whole length and breadth of the problem of civilized government. For when Mexico threw herself shouting into Anglo-Saxon forms of democracy, she challenged her own history and traditions, ignored the instincts of the blood running in her veins, forgot the wrecked temples and palaces and the extinguished civilization of her prehistoric peoples — turning in a day of heroic emotion to institutions possible only to nations of the highest political capacity — and those who had suffered together in the name of the longoppressed republic drifted into war again, unconscious, perhaps, that the real question at issue was whether a political principle or a political method, true or possible in one place, is true or possible in all places, or if race or climate or time, or all three together, must determine whether a nation should be temporarily or permanently 3 ruled from the bottom upward or from the top downward.

It was the patient loyalty of Juarez, " the man in the black coat," to abstract ideals of democracy, that inspired Victor Hugo, the master romancist, to address to the Indian President his famous greeting after the fall of Maximilian's empire in 1867:

" America has two heroes, Lincoln and thee ; Lincoln, by whom slavery has died, and thee, by whom liberty has lived. Mexico has been saved by a principle, by a man. Thou art that man ! "

Yet, above all things Benito Juarez was a lawyer. He had vision without executive strength. He was more interested in theories of government than in government itself. Although his pen gave the deathblow to ecclesiastical tyranny and he courageously shed the blood of imperial Maximilian, giving to the world a rare example of modest dignity, forbearance, and loyalty to principle, neither his purity of purpose nor his understanding of philosophical and governmental theories could bring peace and prosperity to a people speaking fifty-six tongues, degraded and impoverished by centuries of misgovernment, a country swept again and again by civil wars and invasions — a confused nation, with an empty treasury, without credit at home or abroad, swarming with armed bandits, wasted and tormented by successive insurrections.

Peace and honor to the ashes of the incorruptible patriot in whom the unmixed blood of aboriginal America found its supreme vindication ! His place in history is safe.

But to his successor, Porfirio Diaz, fell the task of bringing peace, order, strength, credit, and progress to 4

Mexico. In him is blended the blood of the primitive Mixtecs with that of the invading Spaniards. For thirty years he has ruled his country. At times his government has been harsh, but it has been actual government.

When the great Juarez died, the Mexicans were poor, divided, and prostrate. From the leaders at the capital the cry of triumphant democracy had gone forth to a people almost without commerce or industry and ready to spring at each other's throats again. The police were a jest. The courts were corrupt. There were no banks to take the place of the all-powerful and money-lending Church, now stripped of its wealth. Kidnaping was common, even in the streets of the capital. Highway robbers held all the roads, mingling oaths with a stilted rights-of-man jargon. Mexican national securities were selling in London at ten cents on the dollar. Mexican credit at home and abroad was a subject of laughter.

It was not until Porfirio Diaz became the master of Mexico, and the power, intelligence, and practical justice of his leadership marched irresistibly through the merely beautiful abstractions of imaginative democracy to an actual and unbroken peace, that the people of Mexico ceased to be a chaos of political and religious contentions and became a nation.

Not that liberty perished. Not that the democratic Constitution ceased to be held up as the unchanged and unchangeable abstract ideal of political and social justice. But tranquillity, unity, and order being the foundations of civilization, upon which all prosperity, development, and credit must rest, President Diaz set his face against war in a country wholly given up to war, and by the very might of his character the hero of fifty battles turned from a soldier into a statesman, leading his country into habits of industry, establishing the national 5 credit in all lands, drawing hundreds of millions of dollars of foreign capital into the republic, until its states are traversed by thousands of miles of railways and united by telegraphs, with vast systems of manufactures supplementing the rapidly growing riches of mining and agriculture, all served by splendid new seaports and other public works; so that, with constantly multiplying schools and colleges fertilizing the national intelligence, with a full treasury, with a generation of unbroken peace, with Mexican bonds selling in the markets of the world at a higher price than those of ancient European nations, with the word of Mexico good in all countries — there is little cause for wonder that, whether Porfirio Diaz has governed his country according to the theory of Anglo-Saxon countries or according to the capacities and necessities of the mass of his countrymen, it is the verdict of the world that he alone has known how to turn a mob into a people conscious of nationality, and that, all institutional theories aside, he must be ranked among the nation-makers of history.

The opinion of responsible men everywhere was summed up by President Roosevelt when he wrote from the White House on March 7, 1908:

" President Diaz is the greatest statesman now living, and he has done for his country what no other living man has done for any other country — which is the supreme test of the value of statesmanship."

The most astonishing thing about this foremost man of the modern Americas is that his serene, peaceful, and unerring work as a statesman and ruler contrasts so dramatically with an earlier career of almost continuous fighting, with such romantic adventures, hand-to-hand struggles, hairbreadth escapes, imprisonments, flights, 6 victories, and defeats, that his youth seems almost legendary. One phase of character that persists all through the story of his life is uncorruptibility and consistency of purpose.

President Diaz is not an Anglo-Saxon. He admires Anglo-Saxon institutions. He believes that democracy is the only just principle of government. He knows that democracy in all its parts is possible only to people who have natural self-restraint and an abstract respect for law. His success in bringing his country out of confusion, strife, poverty and ignominy has given him an influence among Mexicans so great that for thirty years, in spite of democratic theories, he has governed Mexico with the power of an autocrat. Nor has he ever shown the slightest desire to insure a continuance of his power by modifying the written form of the republic. His life has been a bridge over which he hopes his people may walk into a more perfect civil liberty. But he has learned to draw a distinction between the truths that lead to anarchy and the methods that produce peace, prosperity, and, ultimately, concord. And, however much he may believe in the future possibilities of the gentle and likeable races who have developed so many capable men in the professions, and who have shown so much bravery in fighting for national independence, he has seen in the history of his country abundant evidence that the hard individual responsibilities of citizenship, which go with absolute democratic government, cannot be assumed in their entirety by the whole Mexican people until education and established habits of industry have prepared the way.

It is not fair to attempt a raw contrast between the work of Juarez and the achievements of Diaz. Juarez served a great purpose greatly. He kept alive a prin- 2 7 ciple. But Diaz created a nation. There was in Diaz the practical wisdom of Marcellus, the grammarian, when he said to Tiberius, " Csesar, thou canst give the Roman citizenship to men, but not to words."

Seldom in history do we find the absolute idealist a successful ruler. His tendency is to soften or ignore facts when they conflict with theories. His most effective function is to inspire the spirit of government, to search out and make clear the just ends of government, and to promote a cheerful, intelligent, loyal, and general acceptance of the necessary burdens of government, rather than to direct the methods of government.

Washington solemnly declared that his confidence in the Constitution of the United States lay in the admirable spirit of compromise in which it was conceived. And if the wisest and best-poised statesman of his age could say that of the great organic law in which the unconquerable aspirations and capacities of the Anglo- Saxon race burst into blossom, what must philosophy — statelier name for common sense — say of the varying shifts and compromises which inevitably lie between the noble democratic formulas borrowed from Anglo- Saxons by imaginative Mexican patriots, and the peace, prosperity and ultimate individual liberty which are the supreme objects of the republic, a vast majority of whose citizens can neither read nor write, are individually indifferent to political institutions, and apparently descended from many Oriental, probably Asiatic, bloods ?

There is no more heroic, no more picturesque, no more commanding and appealing figure in the world than Porfirio Diaz, in whose veins leaps the tide-rip of two races and two civilizations ; nor does modern history present a more wonderful and bewildering problem than 8

Mexico, the mystery of whose remote past, unreadable in prehistoric palaces and temples, makes her future all the more searchless.

In the name of religion, the Spanish priests who went to Mexico under the protection of Hernan Cortes and his steel-clad conquistador cs extinguished an entire civilization reaching back, perhaps, thousands of years, by a systematic, pitiless, and complete destruction of its records.

The long and bloody struggle which drove the Spanish flag from Mexico was followed by a savage and, at times, almost barbarous conflict between the republican forces and ecclesiastical authority, which stripped the arrogant and licentious monastic orders of their civic powers, sheared the Church of its enormous properties, abolished its exclusive privileges, and politically disfranchised its priesthood, leaving the government of the triumphant republic to an experimental democratic statesmanship seeking to express an unlimited imagination in the terms of a provincial experience.

Then the country was mangled by invaders and an imperial Mexican throne was invented for the Austrian Archduke Maximilian by Napoleon III, the weak and treacherous monarch whose gambler's dream of opening up a career for the Latin race on the American continent not only included the destruction of the Mexican republic but apparently also the ultimate conquest of the great Anglo-Saxon democracy under whose shelter all other American republics remained secure against the ambitions of armed European monarchy.

There were days when the independence of Mexico,

if not the future of the American hemisphere, seemed

to hang upon Porfirio Diaz. If he had failed to climb in

the darkness down the rope that swung from the roof of his convent prison in Puebla; if he had accepted the imperial bribe of Maximilian and turned his sword against the republic; if he had lost the decisive battle of Puebla, which made possible the siege of the capital and left Maximilian helpless in Queretaro ; if he had thought of himself rather than his cause and weakened, lost heart, or blundered in any of the crises which hinged upon his courage, patriotism, and power — Napoleon III might have intrenched himself upon the ruins of Mexican liberty and at least attempted the armed conquest of democracy in the new world. When Maximilian and his invaders had driven a wedge of bayonets across the heart of Mexico ; when President Juarez was driven northward until his fugitive government had to take asylum in a village beside the distant American frontier — in that time of weakness and despair it was the young soldier, Diaz, who kept the spirit of resistance alive, who gathered about him the poor and despised Indians, thrilled them by his appeals to their patriotism, taught them how to fight, and, cut off from communication with Juarez or his ministers, created and equipped a native army and led it irresistibly through a wilderness of volcanic mountains and parched valleys against veteran white troops under famous European officers, outwitting Napoleon's experienced commanders, smashing the imperial lines with his ragged Indian volunteers, and driving the enemy back steadily until the last great victory was won and President Juarez passed again into the Mexican capital through the ranks of Diaz's troops, to raise over the national palace the flag of the republic which his faithful general placed in his hands.

But what Diaz accomplished as a soldier, his marvelous, almost incredible adventures, and his resistance to temptation, are less important, although they may 10 more deeply stir the average imagination, than the peaceful thirty years of his work as President of the republic. It is that long stretch of strong, wise, upbuilding regenerating statesmanship that lifts him in his old age to such a height of distinction that he is known in all lands and that his name is accepted everywhere as a guaranty for his country.

It was Juarez who said, " Respect for the rights of others is peace." These wise words are chiseled on most of the monuments erected to the memory of the Indian lawyer. But respect for the rights of others is not a natural instinct in all races. It is the prevailing habit in some races ; in others it seems scarcely to exist at all. Without it true democracy is impossible. In almost exact proportion as the citizens of a country respect each other's rights the government becomes an automatic agency of the popular will. There can be no sounder statement than that a free nation is not a mechanism, but an organism in which every cell is conscious ; and it follows that until prolonged peace, education, and industry completely develop the intelligence and absorb the energies of the mass of the Mexican people the guiding idea of Mexico should be found in President Diaz's abrupt but practical motto, " Less politics and more administration."

y

Chapter II Oppressed Mexico Tries Anglo-saxon Institutions

To understand how Diaz made a peaceful and prosperous nation out of the Mexican people it is well to defer the story of his picturesque and thrillingly adventurous youth and know something- of the heterogeneous human elements that were poured, crushed but unmeltcd and unassimilated, into the uncongenial mold of democracy by an earlier patriotism innocent or forgetful of the fact that self-government after the fashion of Anglo- Saxon peoples is an inheritance as well as an achievement.

Not only are fifty-five native tongues spoken to-day in the republic, but there are still standing the ruins of thousands of palaces, temples, and forts whose histories were already forgotten when the discovery of America was followed by the Spanish conquest of Mexico.

In the peninsula of Yucatan alone these often majestic and richly carved ruins, built by the primitive Mayas, include more than ten thousand, and, possibly, a hundred thousand, hewn-stone structures, most of them representing architecture of singular and noble beauty. Many of the temples, palaces, and forts are buildings of immense size and massiveness. Some are set on the top of lofty truncated pyramids. These mighty ruins, chiseled before metal tools were known in America — at least no trace has ever been found of any but hard stone 12 instruments — stretch over hundreds of miles of almost desolate country. They were but the public structures of a people whose dwelling huts turned to dust in the prehistoric age. It is estimated that the ancient population of the Yucatan peninsula alone may have been 20,000,000 persons. To-day it is less than 400,000, including Campeche and Quintana Roo.

This peninsula is only a fourteenth part of the territory of the Mexican republic, which has an area of 767,259 square miles and is as large as the combined soils of France, Austro-Hungary, England, Ireland, Scotland, Italy, Holland, Portugal, and Belgium. Yet the evidence of an antique and highly developed civiliza- \f tion among the Mayas is so vast as to strike the beholder into awe. For strength as well as imaginative richness these memorials of vanished American culture challenge the stateliest ruins of Egypt, China, or India. The wrecked grandeur of Chichen-Itza and Uxmal is more tragically mysterious than Delhi or Luxor. It is difficult to understand why this wonderful country has not drawn the American traveling public in multitudes to its thrilling scenes of vanished civilization.

There can be no doubt that the Mayas are Orientals. Their faces, heads, ,and bodies, their manners, habits, and ways of thinking, alternately suggest, like their wonderful ruins, China, Corea, India, Japan, Java, and the Malay peninsula.

The matchless ruins of Mitla, standing in mute loveliness in the lonely Oaxaca valley, suggest in their dim frescoes, monoliths, and mosaic walls of cut stone memories of the architects of the Nile valley. The prehistoric sculptures of Palenque, in Chiapas; the monstrous pyramid of Cholula, in the wide Puebla valley, where Cortes and his armed men saw a city with 400 temple towers r3 and promptly slew 6,000 of its inhabitants ; the immense pyramids of San Juan Teotihuacan, near Mexico City, with their buried treasures of carved green jade, obsidian knives, masks, terra-cotta heads, and other primitive objects, bearing designs irresistibly suggestive of early Egypt — from mountainous Sonora, in the northwest, down through 2,000 miles to the very frontiers of Guatemala, the astounding remains of civilization left by the Mayas, Zapotecs, Toltecs, Otomies, Chichimecs, Totonacs, Tlaxcalans, and other peoples who built cities, with temples and palaces, and had organized governments and religions many centuries before the discovery of America by Europe, all bear witness to the fact that the present Indian population of Mexico is descended from races and civilizations that came from across the seas.

The tremendous importance of this lies in the fact that probably eighty per cent of the present native inhabitants of Mexico are Indians or part Indians. There are varying theories of the relative proportions of white and Indian blood in the country, but no reliable figures. President Diaz's own estimate gives about twenty per cent of pure white blood to Mexico. Archaeologists who have spent their lives studying the ancient ruins ; ethnologists who have analyzed the mental, moral, and physical traits of the living populations; statesmen and scholars who have searched out and compared their political tendencies and capacities; and religious leaders who have tested their spiritual understandings and inclinations— all these admit that the precise origin of the Mexican Indians and the manner of their journey to America are mysteries which only dreamers or charlatans pretend to solve. But practically all authorities agree that these Indians are the descendants of Orientals 14 who built the majestic ruins which are at once the wonder and despair of archaeology — the greatest and most fascinating mystery of human history.

There is much, very much, to indicate that a large part of the elder Mexicans came from Asia. Thousands upon thousands of green jade objects have been dug out of ruins so old that even when the Spaniards forced their way into the country the natives had no traditions about them. Little Mongolian masks of jade, death masks of marvelously carved Asiatic faces — not barbaric inventions, but obvious and appealing portraits, worked out with almost Greek nicety — have been found in the valley of Oaxaca, not far from the Mitla ruins.

Not an atom of this jade has ever been found in a state of nature anywhere on the American hemisphere, although it has furnished ornaments for the peoples of China and other Asiatic countries for thousands of years. For three quarters of a century archaeologists and mineralogists have searched the mountains and valleys of Mexico in vain for jade deposits. Yet the presence of jade masks, idols, animals, beads, and other ornaments in the most sacred palaces and temples of ancient Mexico shows that the stone was as greatly prized by the primitive Americans as by Asiatics. How did the jade come to be in Mexico before Columbus crossed the Atlantic if it did not come from the Far East?

It matters little how these races got to America; by means of a continent, or of islands now sunk in the ocean, or whether they crossed into Alaska, or were the descendants of successive groups whose ships were blown by storms over the ocean — that, at least, has happened in the time of recorded history. The thing that seems to be almost indisputable is that the masses of the Mexican nation are racially Orientals, that their blood derives

l5 from the Egyptians or Indians, or Mongols or Malays, or Coreans or Japanese — or is a mixture of all or a part of these peoples. The stupendous architecture left on Mexican soil by their remote ancestors has too many close resemblances to Oriental art to be merely accidental. Besides, there are no crude, barbarian beginnings from which the architecture of ancient Mexico grew. The vanished builders whose works astonish and thrill the traveler of to-day must have already possessed a highly developed knowledge of architecture when they reached America.

There are those who hold that all the ancient civilizations of America, from Peru to Mexico, are the result of Mongol conquests; that, after the defeat of a vast Mongolian army sent in ships by Kublai Khan to conquer Japan in the year 1284, a part of the beaten forces found their way across the Pacific Ocean, seized Peru, established the Inca dynasties, and created a new civilization; that the wonderful Toltecs, who preceded the Aztecs in Mexico, were, in the sixth century, compelled to flee from their homes in Mongolia, near Lake Baikal, to escape the mounted hordes of the pitiless Turkish Grand Khan which swept across Asia, the fugitives having no other chance for life than a desperate voyage - over the seas in search of new land ; and that the Aztecs and the six tribes which accompanied them to America were the seven Mongol tribes which emigrated after one of the bloodiest battles in history, which took place in the year 11 79.

While this explanation of the astounding ruins and puzzling races of Mexico is largely theoretical, there is much to support it in what is known of the laws, customs, ceremonials, and monuments of the prehistoric American civilizations. But, whatever the truth of this 16 may be, one finds enough to explain the Mexico of to-day in the practical certainty that the brown-skinned and yellow-skinned races, and their hybrids, which make up at least three quarters of the republic's population, descend from Oriental bloods, to which truly democratic political institutions are alien if not impossible.

These people were cannibals when the Spaniards found them. They sacrificed human beings to their gods everywhere and the priests ate the limbs of the victims. It was a common thing for Mexican warriors to eat their prisoners. Throughout the country, in all the townships, there were cagelike jails, in which men, women, and children were carefully fattened, so that they might be more palatable and nourishing when killed. One has but to read the many histories of the conquest of Mexico to realize the appalling prevalence of human sacrifice and cannibalism among the long-settled and civilized peoples whose descendants, three hundred years afterwards, undertook the vast responsibilities of absolute democratic government, an experiment which even the most enlightened and politically developed nation in the world has not yet completely vindicated in practice.

The most daring of the early statesmen who established Anglo-Saxon civilization in America did not dream of intrusting their government to the suffrages of the aboriginal American tribes, nor did Washington, Hamilton, or Jefferson suggest the enfranchisement of the Indians as a basis for free American institutions. Not that the fierce, barbarous nomads of the North are to be compared to the gentle and lovable descendants of ancient Mexican civilizations. But only a hundred years before the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock to prepare the way for the grandest and sincerest experiment in democratic government ever attempted by man, 17 the Spanish conquerors found everywhere in Mexico altars dripping with human blood and temples whose walls were black with the stains of slaughter.