for the office of president for more than a generation, where the executive rules all things by means of a standing army, where political offices are sold for a fixed price. I found Mexico to be a land where the people are poor because they have no rights, where peonage is the rule for the great mass, and where actual chattel slavery obtains for hundreds of thousands. Finally, I found that the people do not idolize their president, that the tide of opposition, dammed and held back as it has been by army and secret police, is rising to a height where it must shortly overflow that dam. Mexicans of all classes and affiliations agree that their country is on the verge of a revolution in favor of democracy; if not a revolution in the time of Diaz, for Diaz is old and is expected soon to pass, then a revolution after Diaz.
My special interest in political Mexico was first awakened early in 1908, when I came in contact with four Mexican revolutionists who were at that time incarcerated in the county jail at Los Angeles, California. Here were four educated, intelligent Mexicans, college men, all of them, who were being held by the United States authorities on a charge of planning to invade a friendly nation—Mexico—with an armed force from American soil.
Why should intelligent men take up arms against a republic? Why should they come to the United States to prepare for their military maneuvers? I talked with those Mexican prisoners. They assured me that at one time they had peacefully agitated in their own country for a peaceful and constitutional overthrow of the persons in control of their government.
But for that very thing, they declared, they had been imprisoned and their property had been destroyed. Secret
