forget myself in the successful inauguration of complete democratic government in the country.” His method of dealing with Opposition parties can hardly be called a welcome.
This is but one instance of the hypocrisy of Diaz. He seems, indeed, to have led a sort of Jekyll-and-Hyde existence: to his own people, a tyrant of the worst type; to foreigners, a very pattern of the Presidential virtues. Partly, perhaps, out of ignorance regarding the true conditions prevailing in this unhappy country, partly out of self-interest, foreign statesmen and biographers praised Diaz, "the peacemaker," without stint.
Admiration of a kind is reluctantly accorded him. Shrewdness, intelligence were certainly his. He displayed a talent for diplomacy and political organisation which his opponents could not always equal. His character in private life was unblemished, save here and there a smirch of ingratitude, a blot of treachery to a friend. But it is by his public life that a public man must be judged, and, according to every right standard of government, Porfirio Diaz is surely one of the most lamentable failures in modern history.
The men who surrounded him—the Grupo Cientifico—have by this time achieved well-merited oblivion. But we may glance briefly at the pair who were his chief advisers or abettors.
Jose Yves Limantour, the Minister of Finance, one of Diaz's principal henchmen, was well known in European financial circles as one of the shrewdest and Limantour. most capable financiers of his day. To him the Diaz régime owed much, as without his business sagacity the development of the resources of the country could never have been undertaken in the highly successful manner which marked the rule of his party. Indeed, it is not too much to say that Limantour rescued Mexico from the bankruptcy which at one time certainly threatened it. He had, indeed, a genius for finance, and it
