Identifier: diazmasterofmex00cree (find matches)
Title: Diaz, master of Mexico
Year: 1911 (1910s)
Authors: Creelman, James, 1859-1915
Subjects: Díaz, Porfirio, 1830-1915
Publisher: New York, London, D. Appleton and company
Contributing Library: The Library of Congress
Digitizing Sponsor: The Library of Congress

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Text Appearing Before Image:
Washington solemnly declared that his confidence
in the Constitution of the United States lay in the a
mirable 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 un-
conquerable 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 indi-
vidually indifferent to political institutions, and appar-
ently 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

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Text Appearing After Image:

PRESIDENT DIAZ LAYING A WREATH ON THE TOMB OF JUAREZ.
'
THE QUICK AND THE DEAD

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 conquistadores extinguished an entire civili-
zation reaching back, perhaps, thousands of years, by a
systematic, pitiless, and complete destruction of its
records. The long and bloody struggle which drove the Span-
ish flag from Mexico was followed by a savage and,
at times, almost barbarous conflict between the repub-
lican forces and ecclesiastical authority, which stripped
the arrogant and licentious monastic orders of their
civic powers, sheared the Church of its enormous prop-
erties, 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 imagina-
tion in the terms of a provincial exprerience.

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