[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 appearance of a
civilization and progress, which, considering the time in which it was
compassed, was indeed marvelous.
But all this was only a shell and a semblance. The economic condition
of the Mexican lower classes was not touched--the process of
"nation-building" seemed not to include them. In the shadow of a modern
civilization stalked poverty and ignorance worthy of the Middle Ages.
And it was notorious that in the capital city itself, under the very
eyes of the central Government, was where the very worst conditions and
the most glaring extremes of poverty and wealth were to be seen. On the
one hand, splendid _paseos_ lined with magnificent palaces, where, in
their automobiles, the pleasure-seeking women of the rich displayed
their raiment worth thousands of dollars; and, on the other, streets
filled with beggars, their clothes literally dropping off them in
filthy rags, reeking with the typhus which for years has been endemic
in the City of Mexico.
Let it be said to Diaz's credit that he did try, in a measure, at first
to better those conditions. Hence the public schools which, though
inadequate for the scattered rural population, have accomplished much
in the cities. He also attempted years ago a division of the lands, but
dropped it when he saw that the great landowners were stronger than he
and that to persist might cost him the Presidency.
It was natural and inevitable that a Government in which there was
never any change or movement should stagnate and become corrupt.
Porfirio Diaz was not a President, but, in all save the name, an
absolute monarch, and inevitably there formed about his throne a cordon
of men as unpatriotic and self-interested as he may have been patriotic
and disinterested--as to a great extent he undeniably was. These men
were the Cientificos.
The term is, of course, not their own. It was applied to them by the
Anti-reelectionists, meaning that they were scientific grafters and
exploiters. The full-fledged Cientifico was at once a tremendous
landholder and high government official. To illustrate, the land of the
State of Chihuahua is almost entirely owned by the Terrazas family. In
the days of Diaz, Don Luis Terrazas was always the governor, being
further reenforced by his relative, Enrique C. Creel, high in the Diaz
ministry. In Sonora the land was held by Ramon Corral, Luis Torres, and
Rafael Izabal. These three gentlemen, who were called "The Trinity,"
used to rotate in the government of the state until Corral was made
vice-president, when Torres and Izabal took turn about until the death
of the latter shortly before the Madero revolution. In every state
there was either one perpetual governor or a combine of them.
Thus in each state a small group of men were the absolute masters
politically, economically, and industrially. They made and unmade the
laws at their pleasure. For instance, Terrazas imposed a prohibitory
tax upon cattle which forced the small owners to dispose of their
stock, which he, being the only purchaser, bought at his own price,
after which he repealed the law. They adjusted taxation to suit
themselves, assessing their own huge estates at figures nothing short
of ridiculous, while levying heavily upon the small farmer, and
especially upon enterprise and improvements. They practised peonage,
though peonage is contrary to the Constitution of the Republic, to the
Federal laws, and, in many cases, to the laws of the separate states as
well. They drew public salaries for perverting the government to their
private benefit and enrichment; and as the dictator grew older and
surrendered to his satellites more and more of his once absolute power,
the conditions became so intolerable, and the tyranny and greed of the
Cientificos so shameless and unbridled (infinitely more so in the
southern than in the northern states), that it would have been a
reversal of the history of the world if there had been no revolution.
In 1910 the aged Diaz declared his intention of resigning. Perhaps he
even intended to keep that promise when he made it; but if so, the
Cientificos, who knew that his prestige and the love of the nation for
him were their only shield, induced him to think better of it. The
strongest of the opposing parties was the Anti-reelectionist party. It
embodied the best elements and the best ideals of the country and from
the first was the one of which the Diaz regime was most afraid.
Now by its very name this party was pledged to no reelection, and yet
it so far compromised with the regime as to nominate Diaz for
President, only repudiating Corral, who was odious to the entire
nation. However, the Cientificos saw that this was to be the entering
wedge, and they promptly prepared to crush the new political faction.
Anti-reelectionists were arrested right and left; their newspapers were
suppressed, the presses wrecked, and the editors thrown into prison.
But the party's blood was up. It did not dissolve. It did not nominate
Corral. Instead it struck Porfirio Diaz's name from its ticket and
tendered to Francisco Madero, Jr., not the vice-presidential but the
presidential nomination. The bare fact that he accepted it speaks
volumes for his courage.
Francisco Madero was born October 4, 1873. He was educated from
childhood in the United States and Europe; and upon returning to his
country, imbued with the advanced ideas of the most broad-minded men of
the most enlightened countries in the world, it was perhaps only
natural that he should resent the conditions which he saw in his own
country. The Madero family owns great tracts of land in Coahuila,
besides properties in other states. Madero introduced modern methods
and modern machinery in the management of his estates. Already a
millionaire, he made more millions, at the same time doing much toward
the betterment of conditions for his own immediate dependents among the
lower class.
Madero first attracted attention by writing _The Presidential
Succession in 1910_. The Cientifico clique laughed at him as a
visionary. Suddenly they awoke to the fact that his book, with its
calm, dispassionate logic and democratic tone, was doing them more harm
than a thousand soldiers, and they suppressed its publication. It was
the writing of this book that led to Madero's nomination for President
by the Anti-reelectionist party when every one else had failed it.
Madero took the attitude that he was a presidential candidate in a free
republic and began what he called his democratic campaign. He went from
city to city, delivering speeches and laying his platform before the
people. He was called "the apostle of democracy," and the multitudes
followed him like an apostle indeed. But he did not carry out his
democratic campaign without sacrifice and risk. When he passed through
Hermosillo, Sonora, the hotel-keepers closed their-doors to him.
Torres, feudal lord of the state, had given out the necessary hint and
Madero, for all his millions, could find no apartments for himself and
his wife until a Spaniard--relying upon the fact of being a foreigner--
offered them lodgings, "not wishing to lend himself to so ignoble an
intrigue." This was but one city of many. In all places he had the most
tremendous difficulty in renting halls for his addresses. Frequently he
was reduced to speaking in tumble-down sheds or mule-yards or vacant
lots, the local authorities often hiring rowdies to create disturbances
at his meetings. He was ridiculed, he was threatened, he was
persecuted, but he went on unafraid.
Just before and during the elections every known Maderista, from Madero
down, was arrested on charges of "sedition." Things came to such a pass
that in the city where I lived some sixty prominent Maderistas were
arrested at two o'clock one morning without warrants and on no charge,
it being noteworthy that the men arrested were almost without exception
some of the best and most honorable men in the state. And this happened
at the same hour of the same day in every city in Mexico. But in spite
of the fact that many votes were lost to Madero through intimidation or
actual imprisonment, so strong a vote was registered for the Madero
electors that fraud was resorted to to cover his gains. The result of
the elections was that Diaz and Corral were _unanimously_
reelected--the former for his eighth term and the latter for his
second.
The Anti-reelectionists then appealed to Congress and the Senate to
annul the elections, alleging fraud and intimidation. Without the
slightest pretense of considering or investigating these charges
Congress and Senate--long the mouthpieces of Cientificismo--ratified
the elections as just and legal. Every peaceful measure to bring about
justice in the elections and insure the free expression of the nation's
will was now exhausted. The only recourse left to the people by the
Cientifico regime was war. Their leader at the polls became their
leader in the preparations for that war.
In the midst of this riot of tyranny, while the nation yet seethed with
indignation at the outrageous electoral farce imposed upon it, the
first Centennial of Mexican independence was being celebrated before
the foreign diplomats with unprecedented pomp and display. The
Anti-reelectionists declared that Liberty was dead and that instead of
celebrating they were going to don deep mourning. They were thus a mark
for all manner of persecutions from petty annoyances to the most
unprovoked armed attacks. Some students were fired upon by troops while
they were carrying wreaths to the monument of the boy heroes of
Chapultepec; a young lawyer was arrested for making a speech beneath
the statue of Juarez; and in Tlaxcala a procession of unarmed working
men was fired upon and ridden down by _rurales_, several men and a
woman being killed. Consecrating hypocritical hymns to liberty that did
not exist and heaping with wreaths the tombs and monuments of the
heroes of Mexico, while violating all the ideals for which those heroes
died, drunk with the power they had wielded so long, the Cientificos
pressed blindly on, following the path that Privilege has taken since
the beginning of history and which has only one end.
These are some of the causes and circumstances that made the revolution
of 1910-11--not all of them, for there must be remembered in addition
the Yaqui slave traffic, the contract-labor system of the great
southern haciendas, and a dozen other iniquities, greater and lesser,
which also contributed to precipitating the revolt. It was fortunate
that that revolt was captained by a man of Francisco Madero's _type_--a
man who knew how to win the world's sympathy for his cause and how to
make his subordinates merit that sympathy by their observance of the
rules of civilized warfare.
The actual armed contention of the Madero revolution was singularly
brief, culminating in the capture of Ciudad Juarez, which was followed
by the resignation of Diaz and Corral. There can be no doubt that the
dictatorship could have held together for a considerable time longer
and that Diaz surrendered before he actually had to. But he could
probably see by this time that it was inevitable in any case, and he
was willing to sacrifice his personal pride and ambition sooner than
necessary to avoid bloodshed in Mexico if he could. And also he had it
upon his conscience, and it was brought home to him by the mobs outside
his palace, that he was not the constitutional President of Mexico, but
the tool of the betrayers of her Constitution. That he had been
shamelessly deceived and played upon by the impassable cordon of
Cientificos about him is easy to judge. His message of resignation was
one to touch any heart, combining pathos with absolute dignity.
The resignation of Diaz and Corral was taken by many to signify the
complete surrender of the old régime and the triumph of the revolution.
Indeed, for the moment it so appeared. But although the Cientificos
were ousted from direct political control, their wealth and power and
the tremendous machinery of their domination were still to be contended
with before the revolution could follow up its political success with
the economic reforms which were its real object.
Madero had pledged himself primarily to the division of the lands. He
realized that only by the abolition of the landed aristocracy, and an
equitable distribution among moderate holders for active development of
the huge estates, held idle in great part or worked by peons, could the
progress and prosperity of the nation be put upon a solid basis. He
knew exactly what the remedy was and, though a landed aristocrat
himself by birth and inheritance, was not afraid of it.
As soon as he was elected to the presidency he set a committee of
competent, accredited engineers to work appraising property values in
the different states, and great tracts of hundreds of thousands and
millions of acres, previously assessed at half as many thousands as
they were worth millions, were revalued and reassessed at their true
inherent value. The _haciendados_ raised a frightful cry. They tried
threats, intrigue, and bribery. It was useless; the revaluation went
on. The new administration reclaimed as national property all that it
could of the _terrenos baldios_, or public lands, which under Diaz had
been rapidly merging into the great estates. It established a
government bank for the purpose of making loans on easy terms, and thus
assisting the poor to take up and work these public lands in small
parcels. Even before becoming President, Madero had advised the working
men to organize and demand a living wage, which they did. He attacked
the lotteries, the bull-fights, the terrible pulque trust, the
unbridled traffic of which, more than any other one factor, has
contributed to the degradation of the lower classes. He began to extend
the public-school system.
From the first the Cientificos hampered and impeded him. To foment a
counter-revolution they took advantage of the fact that in various
parts of the country there were disorderly bands of armed men
committing numerous depredations. These men had risen up in the shadow
of the Maderista revolution, and at its close, instead of laying down
their arms, they devoted themselves to the looting of ranches and
ungarrisoned isolated towns. Of these brigands--for they were neither
more nor less, whatever they may have called themselves then or may
call themselves now--the most formidable was Emiliano Zapata. His
alleged reason for continuing in arms after the surrender of the
dictatorship was that his men had not been paid for their services.
President De la Barra paid them, but their brigandage continued. And at
the most critical moment Pascual Orozco, Jr., Madero's trusted
lieutenant, in command of the military forces of Chihuahua, issued--on
the heels of reiterated promises of fealty to the Government--a
_pronunciamiento_ in favor of the revolution and delivered the state
which had been entrusted to his keeping to the revolutionists, at whose
head he now placed himself.
The new malcontents declared that Madero had betrayed the revolution,
and that they were going to overthrow him and themselves carry out the
promises he had made. This sounds heroic, noble, and patriotic, but
will not bear close inspection. In the first place, many of the
revolutionists with whom the new faction allied itself had been in arms
since before Madero was even elected--a trivial circumstance, however,
which did not seem to shake their logic. Moreover, as any honest,
fair-minded person must have recognized, the promises of Madero were
not such as he could fulfil with a wave of his hand or a stroke of his
pen. They were big promises and they required time and careful study
for their successful undertaking and the cooperation of the people at
large against the public enemies, whereas Madero was not given time nor
favorable circumstances nor the intelligent cooperation of any but a
small proportion of the population.
As a matter of fact, Madero himself, far from overstating the benefits
of the revolution led by him or making unwise promises of a Utopia
impossible of realization, addressed these words to the Mexican people
at the close of that conflict: "You have won your political freedom,
but do not therefore suppose that your _economic_ and social liberty
can be won so suddenly. This can only be attained by an earnest and
sustained effort on the part of all classes of society."
It is to be feared that for long years to come Mexico must stand judged
in the eyes of the world by the disgraceful and uncivilized conduct of
the various rebels, or so-called rebels, and simon-pure bandits who are
contributing to the revolt and running riot over the country; but there
is, nevertheless, in Mexico a class of people as educated, as refined,
as honorable as those existing anywhere. And these people--the
_obreros_ (skilled working men) and the professional middle class, as
well as the better elements of the laboring classes, are supporting
Madero--not all in the spirit of his personal adherents, but because
they realize the tremendous peril to Mexico of continued revolution. In
1911 the revolution was necessary--the peril had to be incurred,
because nothing but arms could move the existing despotism; but none of
the pretended principles of the revolution can now justify that peril
when the man attacked is the legal, constitutional, duly elected
President, overwhelmingly chosen by the people, and venomously turned
upon immediately following his election without being given even an
approach to a fair chance to prove himself.
All the better elements of the country realize that Madero no longer
represents an individual or even a political administration. He
represents the civilization of Mexico struggling against the unreined
savagery of a population which has known no law but abject fear, and
having lost that fear and the restraint which it imposed upon it,
threatens to deliver Mexico to such a reign of anarchy, rapine, and
terror as would be without a parallel in modern history. He represents
the dignity and integrity of Mexico before the world.
Whatever the outcome, whether it triumphs or fails, the new
administration, assailed on every side by an enemy as treacherous and
unscrupulous as it is powerful, and making a last stand--perhaps a vain
one--for Mexico's economic liberty and political independence, merits
the support and comprehension of all the progressive elements of the
world.