BarbarousMexico JOHN KENNETH TURNER

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
RZ