XVIIIA. D. 1867THE HERO-STATESMAN
Thereis no greater man now living in the world than Diaz the hero-statesman, father of Mexico. What other soldier has scored fourteen sieges and fifty victorious battles? What other statesman, having fought his way to the throne, has built a civilized nation out of chaos?
This Spanish-red Indian half-breed began work at the age of seven as errand boy in a shop. At fourteen he was earning his living as a private tutor while he worked through college for the priesthood. At seventeen he was a soldier in the local militia and saw his country overthrown by the United States, which seized three-fourths of all her territories. At the age of twenty-one, Professor Diaz, in the chair of Roman law at Oaxaca, was working double tides as a lawyer’s clerk.
In the Mexican “republic” it is a very serious offense to vote for the Party-out-of-office, and the only way to support the opposition is to get out with a rifle and fight. So when Professor Diaz voted at the next general election he had to fly for his life. After several months of hard fighting he emerged from his first revolution as mayor of a village.
The villagers were naked Indians, and found their new mayor an unexpected terror. He drilled them into soldiers, marched them to his native city Oaxaca, captured the place by assault, drove out a local usurper who was making things too hot for the citizens, and then amid the wild rejoicings that followed, was promoted to a captaincy in the national guards.
Captain Diaz explained to his national guards that they were fine men, but needed a little tactical exercise. So he took them out for a gentle course of maneuvers, to try their teeth on a rebellion which happened to be camped conveniently in the neighborhood. When he had finished exercising his men, there was no rebellion left, so he marched them home. He had to come home because he was dangerously wounded.
It must be explained that there were two big political parties, the clericals, and the liberals—both pledged to steal everything in sight. Diaz was scarcely healed of his wound, when a clerical excursion came down to steal the city. He thrashed them sick, he chased them until they dropped, and thrashed them again until they scattered in helpless panic.
The liberal president rewarded Colonel Diaz with a post of such eminent danger, that he had to fight for his life through two whole years before he could get a vacation. Then Oaxaca, to procure him a holiday, sent up the young soldier as member of parliament to the capital.
Of course the clerical army objected strongly to the debates of a liberal congress sitting in parliament at the capital. They came and spoiled the session by laying siege to the City of Mexico. Then themember for Oaxaca was deputed to arrange with these clericals.
He left his seat in the house, gathered his forces, and chased that clerical army for two months. At last, dead weary, the clericals had camped for supper, when Diaz romped in and thrashed them. He got that supper.
So disgusted were the clerical leaders that they now invited Napoleon III to send an army of invasion. Undismayed, the unfortunate liberals fought a joint army of French and clericals, checked them under the snows of Mount Orizaba, and so routed them before the walls of Puebla that it was nine months before they felt well enough to renew the attack. The day of that victory is celebrated by the Mexicans as their great national festival.
In time, the French, forty thousand strong, not to mention their clerical allies, returned to the assault of Puebla, and in front of the city found Diaz commanding an outpost. The place was only a large rest-house for pack-trains, and when the outer gate was carried, the French charged in with a rush. One man remained to defend the courtyard, Colonel Diaz, with a field-piece, firing shrapnel, mowing away the French in swathes until his people rallied from their panic, charged across the square, and recovered the lost gates.
The city held out for sixty days, but succumbed to famine, and the French could not persuade such a man as Diaz to give them any parole. They locked him up in a tower, and his dungeon had but a little iron-barred window far up in the walls. Diaz got through those bars, escaped, rallied a handful of Mexicans, armed them by capturing a French convoy camp,raised the southern states of Mexico, and for two years held his own against the armies of France.
President Juarez had been driven away into the northern desert, a fugitive, the Emperor Maximilian reigned in the capital, and Marshal Bazaine commanded the French forces that tried to conquer Diaz in the south. The Mexican hero had three thousand men and a chain of forts. Behind that chain of forts he was busy reorganizing the government of the southern states, and among other details, founding a school for girls in his native city.
Marshal Bazaine, the traitor, who afterward sold France to the Germans, attempted to bribe Diaz, but, failing in that, brought nearly fifty thousand men to attack three thousand. Slowly he drove the unfortunate nationalists to Oaxaca and there Diaz made one of the most glorious defenses in the annals of war. He melted the cathedral bells for cannon-balls, he mounted a gun in the empty belfry, where he and his starving followers fought their last great fight, until he stood alone among the dead, firing charge after charge into the siege lines.
Once more he was cast into prison, only to make such frantic attempts at escape that in the end he succeeded in scaling an impossible wall. He was an outlaw now, living by robbery, hunted like a wolf, and yet on the second day after that escape, he commanded a gang of bandits and captured a French garrison. He ambuscaded an expedition sent against him, raised an army, and reconquered Southern Mexico.
Porfirio Diaz
Porfirio Diaz
It was then (1867) that the United States compelled the French to retire. President Juarez marched from the northern deserts, gathering the people as hecame, besieged Querétaro, captured and shot the Emperor Maximilian. Diaz marched from the south, entered the City of Mexico, handed over the capital to his triumphant president, resigned his commission as commander-in-chief, and retired in deep contentment to manufacture sugar in Oaxaca.
For nine years the hero made sugar. Over an area in the north as large as France, the Apache Indians butchered every man, woman and child with fiendish tortures. The whole distracted nation cried in its agony for a leader, but every respectable man who tried to help was promptly denounced by the government, stripped of his possessions and driven into exile. At last General Diaz could bear it no longer, made a few remarks and was prosecuted. He fled, and there began a period of the wildest adventures conceivable, while the government attempted to hunt him down. He raised an insurrection in the north, but after a series of extraordinary victories, found the southward march impossible. When next he entered the republic of Mexico, he came disguised as a laborer by sea to the port of Tampico.
At Vera Cruz he landed, and after a series of almost miraculous escapes from capture, succeeded in walking to Oaxaca. There he raised his last rebellion, and with four thousand followers ambuscaded a government army, taking three thousand prisoners, the guns and all the transport. President Lerdo heard the news, and bolted with all the cash. General Diaz took the City of Mexico and declared himself president of the republic.
Whether as bandit or king, Diaz has always been the handsomest man in Mexico, the most courteous,the most charming, and terrific as lightning when in action. The country suffered from a very plague of politicians until one day he dropped in as a visitor, quite unexpected, at Vera Cruz, selected the eleven leading politicians without the slightest bias as to their views, put them up against the city wall and shot them. Politics was abated.
The leading industry of the country was highway robbery, until the president, exquisitely sympathetic, invited all the principal robbers to consult with him as to details of government. He formed them into a body of mounted police, which swept like a whirlwind through the republic and put a sudden end to brigandage. Capital punishment not being permitted by the humane government, the robbers were all shot for “attempting to escape.”
Next in importance was the mining of silver, and the recent decline in its value threatened to ruin Mexico. By the magic of his finance, Diaz used that crushing reverse to lace the country with railroads, equip the cities with electric lights and traction power far in advance of any appliances we have in England, open great seaports, and litter all the states of Mexico with prosperous factories. Meanwhile he paid off the national debt, and made his coinage sound.
He never managed himself to speak any other language than his own majestic, slow Castilian, but he knew that English is to be the tongue of mankind. Every child in Mexico had to go to school to learn English.
And this greatest of modern sovereigns went about among his people the simplest, most accessible of men. “They may kill me if they want to,” he said once,“but they don’t want to. They rather like me.” So one might see him taking his morning ride, wearing the beautiful leather dress of the Mexican horsemen, or later in the day, in a tweed suit going down to the office by tram car, or on his holidays hunting the nine-foot cats which we call cougar, or of a Sunday going to church with his wife and children. On duty he was an absolute monarch, off duty a kindly citizen, and it seemed to all of us who knew the country that he would die as he had lived, still in harness. One did not expect too much—the so-called elections were a pleasant farce, but the country was a deal better governed than the western half of the United States. Any fellow entitled to a linen collar in Europe wore a revolver in Mexico, as part of the dress of a gentleman, but in the wildest districts I never carried a cartridge. Diaz had made his country a land of peace and order, strong, respected, prosperous, with every outward sign of coming greatness. Excepting only Napoleon and the late Japanese emperor, he was both in war and peace the greatest leader our world has ever known. But the people proved unworthy of their chief; to-day he is a broken exile, and Mexico has lapsed back into anarchy.