cs. Diaz has given this strange mixed race
education, and a high order of education for such a people; he has
brought his country to a financial position in which the Government
can, or could, borrow all the money it wanted at four per cent.
Railways intersect the land in every direction. The largest financial
interests are American, the next in importance are British. Except
Germany, no other foreign country has much capital invested in Mexico.

Thus closes one of the most wild and romantic episodes of the world's
history--a peasant boy who became a soldier, a general who became a
President--a President who became a great autocrat, who raised a
country from obscurity to greatness, and was finally driven from power
by the very people he had educated, and to whom he had brought vast
blessings.

The great Diaz in his eighty-first year has passed from power, the
power he used so well. Verily a moving spectacle from first to last.

DOLORES BUTTERFIELD[1]

[Footnote 1: Reproduced by permission from the _North American
Review_.]

In contemplating the present situation in Mexico there is a tendency of
late to deplore the Madero revolution and the overthrow of Diaz, and to
overlook the fact that the Diaz regime itself not only made and forced,
by its political abuses, the revolution that overthrew it, but, by its
economic abuses, prepared the country for the anarchy now rife in it;
and also that it is the very same ring of men who surrounded Diaz and
finally rendered his rule unbearable who are now financing and
fomenting the present rebellion against a Government not in sympathy
with them nor subservient to their interests.

Porfirio Diaz attained the presidency of Mexico thirty-five years ago
by overthrowing Lerdo de Tejada. He put an end to brigandage, which was
at that time wide-spread. Such bandits as he could not buy he
exterminated. His political opponents he also bought or exterminated,
so that without the slightest disturbance to the national peace he
could be unanimously reelected whenever his term expired. Out of
bankruptcy he established credit; he put up schools; he invited foreign
capital into his country and made it possible for foreign capital to go
in; and so he gradually built up a material progress which won him the
name of "nation-builder." There were railroads and telegraphs; the
cities were graced with beautiful edifices, with theaters and parks,
with electricity and asphalt. There was the appearanc