BarbarousMexico JOHN KENNETH TURNER

316 BARBAROUS MEXICO
wanderer, who shoots wildly at the fleeing phantoms of the
night; he was so terrorized that the only means of relieving his
blue funk was to terrorize in return."
Hand in hand with cruelty and cowardice often
travels hypocrisy and of the three Diaz is not the least
endowed with hypocrisy. Constantly is he foisting new
shams and deceptions and farces upon the public. His
election farces and his periodical pretense of wishing
to retire from the presidency and the reluctantly yielding
to a universal demand on the part of his people have
already been referred to. Diaz's rule began in hypocrisy,
for he went into office on a platform which he had no notion
of carrying out. He pretended to consider the doctrine
of non-re-election of president and governors of
enough importance to warrant turning the nation over in
a revolution, yet as soon as he had entrenched himself in
power he proceeded to re-elect himself as well as his
governors on to the end of time.
When Elihu Root went in to Mexico to see Diaz and
to arrange some matters in regard to Magdalena Bay
Diaz was desirous of showing Root that the Mexican
people were not as poverty-stricken as they had been
painted. He therefore, through his Department of the
Interior, distributed the day before Root's arrival in
the capital, 5,000 pairs of new pantaloons among that
class of workmen who were habitually most prominently
on the streets. In spite of orders that the pants were
to be worn, the majority of them were promptly exchanged
for food, and so Mr. Root was probably not
very badly fooled. The incident merely goes to show
to what extents the petty hypocrisy of the Mexican ruler
sometimes goes.
Diaz is the head of the Masons in Mexico, yet he
nominates every new bishop and archbishop the country