gentlemen in appearance; who can command the respectful attention of business men; who know how to ask for the information they desire. The result is that Mexico is steadily informed of the moods and needs of this country.

A decade has convinced me that Mexico is worth the better acquaintance of her neighbors; and a review of our newspaper and book prints of the last two years concerning Mexico, followed by a new overrunning of the republic, has not lessened my conviction. It certainly seems that a little modern and interior truth as to our next-door neighbor might be beneficial to us. We have had at least enough of the ragtag and bobtail Mexico, enough of the ancient and the picturesque-both fascinating, but both, as a rule, fearfully and wonderfully "done"; for we have had too few Janviers, and only one Bandelier. But I have not yet seen Mexico given justice as a human quantity, an ambitious marcher in the procession of nations. And that is what she is this American Cinderella, who is very like to surprise some of her supercilious sisters.

Mexico is not Utopia. It is a very human country, with very human shortcomings. The nineteenth century's end may be too early for us to allow that Providence personally created anything outside the United States; but, at any rate, the apprentices who did some other portions of mankind were fairly competent. Of course the Armada is much more vital to Americans than is the pioneering of America; but in spite of our reasonable hostility to the Spanish blood, we must not give our eyes the lie. The fact remains that yonder disprized country is making a development as wonderful as sudden; that while our neighborly backs were turned she has stepped out from her darkness, young, vigorous, clothed upon with all that gives dignity and stability to a nation, and girded as to her loins for the most practical of runnings. She is no longer old Mexico, the romantic hag whose wrinkles and tatters we have found so grotesque. While we have been achieving a material development, she has wrought the political and social miracle of the century. Within less time than has elapsed since our civil war invented millionaires, Mexico has stepped across as wide a gulf. From a state of anarchy tempered by brigandage-wherein it was

better to be President than to be right, and better to be a revolutionist than either-she has graduated to be the most compact and unified nation in the New World. She has acquired not only a government which governs, but one which knows how to govern-and contemporaneously a people which has learned how to be ruled. He should be a happy patriot to whom it is given to make his country a hundred times as good as he found it—a hundred times as contented, prosperous, and respected; and that is what sort of fortune has befallen the creator of modern Mexico.

Only those who seriously knew the country in the old days can at all conceive the change from the Mexico of a generation back to the Mexico of now. There was no touring then, and nowhere was travel more unsafe. By every country road-even into the very heart of cities-the bandido robbed and murdered. Naturally. There was nothing else for him to do-unless to make a revolution, which requires brains and money. There were even lady Turpins, and some of them were geniuses. Nor was there any special paucity of revolutions-and dozens of them were successful. There were no railroads, no telegraphs, practically no commerce; at the bottom of all, no security. It would be rather picturesque than scientific to say that no man knew when he went to bed (and least of all the President) what the government would be in the morning; but the exaggeration is not wholly ridiculous.

To-day Mexico is-and I say it deliberately-the safest country in America. Life, property, human rights, are more secure than even with us. As for stability, the record speaks for itself. Mexico had sixty-two viceroys in 286 years, which is not very tumultuous; but it also has had fifty-two presidents, emperors, and other heads in fifty-nine years of this century. Now, one President for twenty years. Some will say that this is not republican. Possibly not, but it is business. Among all the mistakes of foreigners as to Mexico, none is more groping than that which disparages its government. One must be careless either of the facts or of the English language to call that government a despotism. It is not even-to such as are jealous of accurate speech-a dictatorship. It is logical paternalism-a scheme frightfully dangerous under a bad father, in

calculably beneficial under a good one. Mexico is a republic in chancery; free as we are, but less licensed; happy, safe, prosperous, under the system whereby we administer our homes; and proud of the remarkable man who has done what no other ruler of modern times has even dreamed of being able to do, and who still keeps a quiet, steady fist in the waistband of the youngster he has taught to walk.

As I have said, Mexico is not perfect. Perhaps few have had room to feel its faults more keenly; but though the temptation to be superior and critical is too much now and again for human nature to resist, I would rather take, on the whole, a more original line, and tell more important truths than concern God's wisdom in making me smarter than the people among whom I travel. In a word, my hope is to convey some notion of the genuine Mexico I have watched for a decade, and have just now gone over anew for this express purpose. What shall be said is not guess-work, nor crumbs from the table of hotel hangers-on and refugee Americans and rented interpreters. It is the personal knowledge of a documentary student and field student who has followed Mexico from the dates of Ixtlilxochitl's mythography to within a week of this writing. I have just reinvaded nearly every state of the republic; conversed by wholesale for nearly three months with every class, from the President down to the meanest pelado; sounded millionaires and beggars, cabinet officers and muleteers, merchants, authors, street-car conductors, scientists, cargadores, mineowners, peons, railroad men, priests, professors, and bull-fighters. These facts may excuse the claim of tolerable knowledge of the present pulse of Mexico. No man can know a country who does not know its people. If he goes dumb and deaf among them, he is also half blind, for he cannot comprehend what he does see unless he knows why. And he cannot know a people until he has talked with them in their own tongue to something like the average length of his mind's tether and theirs.

Within ten years the brigands of Mexico have been simply wiped out. It has been-to such as know the geographical obstacles—a marvellous achievement; and the political difficulties were as great. First, whatsoever brigand was caught

and Diaz has a way of catching-stood just long enough in front of an adobe wall for the firing party to crook the right forefinger. There were no hung juries nor pardon governors. Second, the same hand-so firm and swift to justice knew how to open an alternative door. Nowadays the bandit needs not. There is something else for him to do; and he finds it not only more salubrious, but more to his taste, to take a part in the development of the pátria he was proud of even when he was her curse. He would rather upbuild than tear down, if he has a chance, even if there were no "Porfirio" and no rurales.

I do not know anything in history which fairly parallels these twenty years in Mexico. No other man has taken a comparable dead weight of population and so uplifted and transformed it. The wonder is all the more because to this day every other colony of Spain in the New World looks to be the worse off for the independencia. Whatever we may say of the theory of self-government, in practice not one of them was ever so miserably viceroyed or captain-generalled as it has been presidented four-fifths of the time since 1821. Very much the same was true of Mexico until recently. It has had patriotic rulers sometimes; but that they were at last sorry rulers the very roster of them shows. Four presidents in a year is hardly an index of prosperity.

It is not far to remember when there was not a railroad in Mexico, and when other material conditions were in proportion. The actual Mexico has forty railroads, with nearly seven thousand miles of track, and everything that that implies. Its transportation facilities are practically as good as those of our Western States; and the investment is far more profitable. It is netted with telegraph lines (with the cheapest tariffs in America), dotted with post-offices, schools, costly buildings for public business and public beneficence. It is freer than it was ever before

with free schools, free speech, free press. It is happier than ever before, and more prosperous than even in the bonanza days of the magnificent silver-kings of Zacatecas and Guanajuato. There are degrees, of course, by local variation of impulse or of opportunity; but there is progress every where-material, intellectual, moral.

If the visible prosperity of Mexico, in

the face of certain of its circumstances, shall seem enigmatic to sane people whose sane views are based on radically unlike surroundings, yet only ignorance can deny the fact. Mexico is admirably prosperous, in spite of seven years' drouth; in spite of the Garza revolution (kindled in the United States, in ways and for reasons too complicated to be reviewed here); in spite of a national debt contracted when exchange was at from 8 to 16, and being paid with exchange at from 85 to 102; in spite even of cheap money. It has been a miracle of statesmanship, but a miracle which will never be repeated in a dissimilar land. I will try to explain, later, how even so terrible a blow as the depreciation of silver was to Mexico has been turned to the advantage of a nation which lies in the hollow of one man's hand.

Perhaps the two things which most impressed me in this fairly thorough review of Mexico were the fever of municipal improvement and the sheer epidemic of public schools. These are but logical features of the Diaz administration; probably no more remarkable than the other methods of the digestion which has assimilated so chaotic a meal, but less familiar, since they are but now ripening to the harvest. Peace had first to be se

cured; and that cannot be had until it is no longer possible for rebels to combine and drill by the month before the government even hears of it. Commerce comes after railroads and harbors, and political reform after commerce. And only now is the country ripe for the other development which has loomed logical but late in the statesmanship of a decade.

General Diaz came up by a revolution; and that means debts as well as inheritances not of his choosing. There were accidental allies to be considered, and hold-overs who could not be all at once swept away-for stability is the first need and the first duty of any government. But both these factors are now practically eliminated. Diaz has outlived nearly all his first associates; and in one of the most extraordinary games of chess ever played in statecraft he has shifted, cornered, or jumped the hold-over impossibles. There is left to-day in Mexico not one important figure that could by any reasonable probability set face against the government, nor one that is to its serious present discredit. The long era of dishonest officials, little and big, is past. There are no more brigand governors; no more customs collectors wonted to "fix the accounts to suit themselves"-as a President once told a friend of mine to do. There

is probably no other country in the New World whose whole public service is today so scrupulously clean; and this large assertion is made neither carelessly nor ignorantly. One has not to remember long to a time when even the presidency of Mexico was a den of robbery; nor half so far to thievish governors and petty of ficials. But the Diaz administration has never had a stain of its own; and it has kept up its steady pressure until now not a state in the republic is spotted as to its local government.

Even to one as familiar with the swift development of parts of our West as with the more conservative growth of our East, it is surprising to watch the gait of almost every Mexican city in municipal improve ments. Modern water-works to replace the fine old Spanish aqueducts; modern sewerage to replace the street sinks of centuries; modern lighting, modern transit, modern health departments; public buildings better than our average towns of the like population think they can afford; splendid prisons, markets, hospitals, asylums, training-schools-these are some of the things the "despotism" of Diaz is planting through the length and breadth of the country. As for schools, it sometimes made me smile, but oftener turned my eyes moist, to note the perfect mania to have them-and to have them of the best. Every state capital has its free public model schools," on which it lavishes a wealth of love and money; and the state earnestly follows its lead. There is

now in Mexico no hamlet of one hundred Indians, I believe, which has not its free public school. This summer (1896) has seen a radical change. Hitherto the schools of the republic had been in charge of the municipalities, the federal government aiding in their support with about $1,000,000 a year. In July the central government took direct charge of every public school in Mexico. This is to secure homogeneity in the system. For the men and women now in charge of the schools of Mexico, I must admit that I have never met a more faithful and enthusiastic corps; and they are, on the average, very fairly fitted for their work. In every state there are normal schools, generously endowed by the government, for the fit training of these teachers; and the attendance is encouragingly large. There are also countless industrial schools, art schools, professional schools, and the like, not to mention the host of private schools, of which some are entirely admirable. The teaching of religion in public schools is absolutely prohibited. "That," President Diaz said to me, "is for the family to do. The state must teach only scholarship, industry, and patriotism. In the private schools we do not interfere with religious training. Beyond the standard we require of all, they may teach anything they like, so long as it is honorable and useful." The attitude of Mexico on this point is curious. There has been disestablishment throughout Spanish America, but it is