CHAPTER XVI
DIAZ HIMSELF
"But Diaz himself—isn't he a pretty good sort of fellow?"
It is a question that almost invariably rises to the lips of the average American when he learns for the first time of the slavery, peonage and political oppression of Mexico. Though the question is only another evidence that the Diaz press agents have done their work well, yet it is one that may very well be examined separately.
The current American estimate of Porfirio Diaz, at least up to the past year or two, has indeed been that he is a very good fellow. Theodore Roosevelt, in writing to James Creelman after the publication in Pearson's Magazine of the latter's famous laudatory article, declared that among contemporary statesmen there was none greater than Porfirio Diaz. In the same year, during a trip to Mexico, William Jennings Bryan spoke in the most eulogistic terms of Diaz's "great work." David Starr Jordan of Stanford University, in recent speeches, has echoed Creelman's assertion that Diaz is the greatest man in the western hemisphere. And hundreds of our most distinguished citizens have expressed themselves in a similar vein. On the part of prominent Americans traveling in Mexico, it has become a custom, a sort of formality of the trip, to banquet at Chapultepec castle—the lesser lights at Chapultepec cafe—and to raise the after-dinner voice in most extravagant praise, loudly to
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