and practice, with strong passions, and love of
show. But they mark a people, not decadent, but evolving. The Mexicans
are at the beginning, not the end, of their civilisation; the rise, not
the fall, of their life. Here is the material of a vigorous and
prolific race which may be destined to bulk largely--like the whole of
Spanish-America--in the future _regime_ of the civilisation of the
white man.

[Illustration: TYPES OF MEXICANS OF THE UPPER CLASS. A FAMOUS MINISTER
OF FINANCE: SENOR LIMANTOUR. A FAMOUS GENERAL AND MINISTER OF PUBLIC
WORKS. AN ARCHBISHOP. A STATE GOVERNOR.]

The "era of glorious progress"--to use the Mexican term--which the long
dictatorship of the present famous President of Mexico inaugurated is a
theme which occupies the Mexican mind and pen very largely. The
European writer ungrudgingly records it, and the much-used adjective
has much of truth for its constant use. General Porfirio Diaz has been
wise and fortunate, and has been able to surround his administration
with the talented men of his time--_una pleiade incontable de hombres
conspicuos_, to quote from a Mexican description of his colleagues--"an
innumerable pleiades of conspicuous men!" in their own grandiloquent
phrases. As for the President, it might be supposed that the tendency
to deify him by his contemporaries, and the constant pouring out of
adulation and flattery upon him for the last twenty years, has made him
proof against the workings of vanity. He well deserves this praise,
both from his countrymen and from foreigners; but so long and varied a
course of it must prove unpalatable, notwithstanding that the
Spanish-American, as a rule, is capable of absorbing an infinite amount
of praise. Porfirio Diaz has brought his country up from chaos, and for
this fortunate work he has to thank his own staunch character and the
fact that a time had arrived in the natural evolution of America when
even the most turbulent States are called upon to perform their
function and carry out their destiny. The man and the hour arrived
together, and Diaz deserves to rank among the historic statesmen of the
world.

The Mexicans, in their oratory and writings, are still congratulating
themselves upon their overthrow of the power of the Church, and of the
other ancient tyrannies which were a bar to their progress as a modern
nation. But the tendency--though growing less as time goes on--is to
overrate this. They pride themselves on being "modern," an