But to return from this digression. Few will dispute the weakness and futility of the Mexican government before the time of Diaz or deny the absolute nature of the latter's rule. But many (on the first impulse) will vigorously object to going any further. Granted, they will say, that self-government in Mexico before 1910 proved a failure. Conditions since that time have changed, and it is both unjust and foolish to speak of the Mexico of to-day as though she still followed the practices and suffered from the evils of an outlived yesterday. If the premise is correct, this position certainly cannot be questioned. But in any matter of history facts are of some importance in reaching right conclusions, as they are in science. And these are the facts of recent Mexican politics.

From 1910 to 1924, a period of fourteen years, Mexico has had five major presidents - Diaz, Madero, Huerta, Carranza, and Obregón. She has had in addition six temporary or provisional presidents, two of whom held office for nearly six months each, and one of whom was in power less than fifty minutes. She has had as many as three different presidents of one kind or another in a single day. She has seen her capital more than once or twice fall into the hands of banditrevolutionists, such as Villa and Zapata. She has seen two of her five major presidents assassinated in the revolutions which brought about their overthrow. She has seen two others driven into exile, where they died. And the fifth, Obregón, she has seen escape the certain fate of exile or death within the past year only because the United States Government came to his support at the crisis of his administration.

These facts are worthy of sober consideration. In them there is not much,

surely, to indicate that the present state of Mexican politics shows any great improvement over that which has gone before. What has happened, indeed, is really this: The thirty years of tranquillity and peace under Diaz misled public opinion in the United States and taught us to look upon the present revolutionary period in Mexico as an abnormal and unnatural state. In reality, however, the confusion and violent political upheavals Mexico has experienced since 1910 are the normal characteristics of her government. This is no new idea. Nearly a century ago, De Tocqueville, that keen student of American political institutions, wrote: "To the present day Mexico is alternately the victim of anarchy and the slave of military despotism. . The incessant revolutions which have convulsed the South American provinces for the last quarter of a century have frequently been adverted to with astonishment, and expectations have been expressed that those states would soon return to their natural state. But can it be affirmed that the turmoil of revolution is not actually the natural state of the South American Spaniards at the present time? The inhabitants of that fair portion of the Western Hemisphere seem obstinately bent on pursuing the work of inward havoc. If they fall into a momentary repose from the effects of exhaustion, that repose prepares them for a fresh state of frenzy.'

In this similarity of political conditions in modern Mexico to the political conditions of De Tocqueville's day (or of any other day for that matter, except at the time of Diaz) lies the greatest discouragement for the believer in self-government across the border. Revolutions now are quite as numerous as they ever were. Elections are still important only as they register the will of the faction in control, or ratify

the results of a revolution just accomplished, or usher in an insurrection against the administration. The great purposes of government still wait to be accomplished; and the common people of the land, when they progress at all, go forward only on slow and halting feet.

To the impartial and candid student of Mexican history, it is thus obvious that the government of that country has failed lamentably during the past hundred years to do the things it ought to have done; that it has done many things it ought not to have done, and that the true spirit of democracy has not yet manifested itself in free institutions and the firm establishment of law and order.

Merely to point out these conditions, however, without seeking to discover and analyze the factors that lie behind them, would be of little use. The thoughtful man must ask himself at once why the problem of self-government in Mexico (as indeed in almost all Spanish-American countries) has been found so difficult and in some respects is seemingly so impossible.

The first answer to this question lies, of course, in the type of people with which the problem has to deal. 'No polity,' wrote Bagehot, 'can get out of a nation more than there is in the nation.' And, at the very outset, it is worth while pausing for a moment to see what sort of stuff has gone into the making of the Mexican nation. The office of the American ConsulGeneral in Mexico City two years ago issued a general information bulletin on the consular district directly under its jurisdiction. This district includes the central part of Mexico and contains approximately 6,000,000 people, or nearly half the population of the entire country. The inhabitants are further advanced than any other large body of the Mexican people, and have

certainly had greater opportunities to profit from the operations of the federal government than any of their fellow countrymen. The following paragraph, however, from the consular bulletin thus describes these people:

'Most of the inhabitants outside of the cities are full-blood Indians. Of the total population at least eighty per cent are illiterate and indigent, having the lowest standards of living, making use of the barest necessities of clothing, food, and shelter, and enjoying no luxuries. Corn and beans constitute the staple articles of food. Scant cotton covering for the body, with perhaps a native blanket for a winter coat and sandals for the feet, supply the usual clothing. Four walls and a roof, with dirt floor and no heating or sanitary accommodations, is the customary housing for a family of this numerous class. There is no middle class outside of the cities, where clerks, small tradesmen, and minor government officials form a limited class between the two extremities.'

In that brief description, if one reads it carefully, are surely to be found sufficient serious obstacles in the path of self-government in Mexico. Let us consider in the first place the question of race. Less than ten per cent of Mexico's 15,000,000 citizens are of pure white extraction. Of the remainder, about one half are of mixed white and Indian blood; but even in this mestizo or mixed class the Indian strain so greatly predominates that it is almost impossible to differentiate the great majority from the pure Indian element.

Lastly come the Indians themselves, who, without the slightest trace of Caucasian or other foreign blood, constitute nearly fifty per cent of the entire population of the country. This great substratum of the Mexican nation presents a problem in self-gov

ernment so difficult and complex as to discourage any but the most exalted and ardent believers in democracy. They are people but little affected by the veneer of civilization under which they have lived for four hundred years. In large part they still follow the old customs of their fathers, live the old Indian life, speak in many cases the old Indian dialects, retain the Indian outlook upon life, cherish the old Indian conception of social and political relationships, know nothing of national patriotism or ties of unity outside their tribal or small community associations, and have neither any understanding of the alien form of government under which they live nor any desire to participate in its operations. Such is the great body of raw material out of which Mexico must build her popular institutions and fashion her democratic government!

Another of the great drawbacks to self-government in Mexico is the lack of education among the people. It is certainly a very conservative statement to say that eighty per cent of the entire population are illiterate, and probably not half of the twenty per cent who can read and write possess more than these bare rudiments of an education. How can a democracy be successfully erected on such a foundation? Is there some peculiar spirit abroad in Mexico which makes it possible for a free government to flourish there under such conditions of illiteracy and gross ignorance when else where it demands intelligence and education to survive?

A third difficulty in the way of selfgovernment in Mexico is the isolation and lack of adequate means of communication from which the country suffers. In the early years of national development, before the coming of the railroads, the people of the United States found it possible to travel and

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to transport their commerce by means of river highways. Regions far removed from the older centres of population were made accessible, the national life was unified, and widely separated states were given a true community of interest and a mutual understanding by such great rivers as the Mississippi, the Ohio, the Hudson, and the Missouri.

Mexico, on the other hand, possessed none of these aids to national unity and political homogeneity. Instead of a network of navigable rivers to knit the land together, there were only great mountain ranges, and wide deserts, and impenetrable jungles to foster extreme provincialism and political disunity.

Even the construction of railroads, which did not begin until about 1880, failed to overcome these physical hindrances which so seriously retard the development of an effective democratic government; and even to-day only a handful of states in the republic enjoy anything like an adequate railway service, and many vast areas, such as Lower California and the Yucatan Peninsula, have no rail connection whatever with any other section of the country.

Nor has the coming of the automobile to any great degree broken down these barriers of isolation. For automobile roads, except in a few of the larger cities, are as yet almost nonexistent. To go from the border, or from a single Mexican seaport, to the capital by automobile is virtually impossible. And nowhere in the country is a journey of a hundred miles to be undertaken lightly or without careful preparation.

One of the most practical benefits any government could render Mexico, whether one considers the matter from the social, the economic, or the political standpoint, would be to construct serv

iceable automobile highways throughout the country, and make easily accessible those vast areas which so long have remained geographically isolated, economically backward, culturally stagnant, and politically untrained and unfitted for self-government.

Another cause of the ill success of popular government in Mexico is the failure of Mexican society to develop a middle class. No nation has ever yet succeeded as a democracy, or ever will succeed, in which all wealth and education and culture and political power are lodged in the hands of a small minority and denied utterly to the great masses of the population. Time out of mind Mexico has suffered from this social malady, nor has she to-day by any means found a remedy for the evil, though there is now some ground for hope that the movement started by Madero, if it does not degenerate too far into an irresponsible and destructive radicalism, may gradually ameliorate the situation.

Still another handicap to self-government, and one that must stand at the very forefront in importance, is the lack of training and tradition of selfgovernment from which the Mexican people suffer. There is no virtue, no supernatural power, in the word democracy that can immediately transform a people, ignorant, disunited,, utterly unskilled in the difficult business of politics, and wholly unacquainted with the complex processes of self-government, into a society that knows at once how to make its own laws, administer its own affairs, fashion the political institutions necessary to meet its own peculiar needs, and keep the machinery of government in operation.

'I am still further from thinking, as so many people do,' wrote a very able student of government early in the last century, 'that men can be in

stantaneously made citizens by teaching them to read and write. True information is mainly derived from experience; and if the Americans had not been gradually accustomed to govern themselves, their book learning would not assist them much at the present day.'

In any comparison between the development of democracy in Mexico and in the United States, it is essential to keep this point in mind. Long before the American people established themselves as an independent nation, they had served their apprenticeship in self-government as colonists. They were Englishmen, moreover, and the sons of Englishmen. As such they were accustomed to the theory and practices of government. They were well acquainted with 'the customs which obtain in the political world' and familiar with the mechanism of the laws.' They were already practised in the discipline of partial independence and had been tempered by more than a century's schooling in self-government.' Accordingly they knew not only how to make their own laws, but also how to abide by the results of a political contest without resort to revolution. They were, in substance, masters of the art of government long before they attempted to govern themselves.

"The citizen of the United States,' wrote De Tocqueville, 'does not acquire his practical science and his positive notions from books; the instruction he has acquired may have prepared him for receiving those ideas, but it did not furnish them. The American learns to know the laws by participating in the acts of legislation; and he takes a lesson in the forms of government from governing. The great work of society is ever going on beneath his eyes, and, as it were, under his hands.'

But this knowledge of the actual workings of free government was not all that the American colonist had when he freed himself from the restraints and guidance of the mother country. He had also behind him the splendid tradition of English freedom. He was determined that none should take from him those 'ancient and undoubted rights' from which that freedom sprung. But both his temperament and his experience convinced him that liberty was only valuable as men held it in restraint and that it would soon degenerate into the tyranny of despotism or of anarchy unless it was guarded from excess.

The Mexican, on the contrary, when he severed himself from Spain, had none of the advantages which the citizens of the Thirteen Colonies possessed. For three hundred years he had been under an absolutism which gave him no training whatsoever in self-government, and consequently he knew nothing of its principles or its practices. In his mind authority was always associated with tyranny, and he had no knowledge of how to fashion a government in which liberty and force should be combined in right proportions. He had no great tradition running back across the centuries by which he could interpret the meaning of freedom and define its limits, and he possessed no fixed ideas of liberty by which to order and direct his political experiments.

Knowing no free institutions of their own, and lacking the tradition of self-government, the Mexicans did the obvious and natural thing when they came to establish their own republic. They borrowed the ideas of government and even its very forms from their Anglo-Saxon neighbors. But in doing this, as De Tocqueville says, 'although they copied the letter of the law, they were unable to create or to

introduce the spirit and the sense which give it life.' Or, to borrow Lowell's more homely figure, they were 'seduced by the French fallacy that a new government could be ordered like a new suit of clothes.'

H. G. Ward, the earliest of the British historians of Mexico, also called attention to this same fundamental defect of the Mexican political programme. 'No change of government,' he wrote in 1827, 'can be productive of a simultaneous change in the habits and opinions of the people governed. It indeed it must may ultimately affect them. It may exalt or debase the national character, strengthen or enervate it, according as it affords. more or less scope for the development of individual talent, and more or less encouragement for its application to the public service. But no constitution, even if it came down from Heaven with the stamp of perfection upon it, could eradicate at once the vices engendered by three centuries of bondage, or give the independent feelings of free men to a people to whom until lately the very name of freedom was unknown.'

In other words, when Mexico became independent the overwhelming majority of her people, as I have already said, were densely ignorant; they were held apart by almost impassable racial and social divisions; they were separated by great physical barriers; they had no tradition of selfgovernment, no training in self-government, no instinct or aptitude for self-government; and they were called upon immediately to set up a democ

racy

the most complex of all governments, the most difficult to operate, and the most easily impaired - and to adopt as their own the political institutions and practices of another people, a people much further advanced in national consciousness, tenfold bet