The country has merely had the promise of it. However, the promise has undoubtedly helped to keep patriotic Mexicans fighting for a fulfillment, however great the odds against them. When Porfirio Diaz captured the Mexican government in 1876 the Mexican battle for political freedom seemed won. The last foreign soldier had been driven out of the country, the throttling grip of the church on the state had been broken, the country had inaugurated a system of universal suffrage, it had adopted a constitution much like that of the United States, and finally, its president, one of the authors of the constitution, Lerdo de Tejada, was in the act of putting that constitution in operation. The personal revolution of General Porfirio Diaz, made successful by force of arms only after it had failed twice, put a sudden stop to the progressive movement, and ever since that time the country has gone back politically, year by year. If it were humanly possibly to put a stop to the movement for democracy in a country by killing the leaders and persecuting all connected with it, democracy would long ago have been killed in Mexico, for the leaders of every political movement in opposition to President Diaz, however peaceful their methods, however worthy their cause, have either been put to death, imprisoned or hunted out of the country. And as I shall show in the next chapter, this statement is literally true down to the present day.
Briefly I will sketch some of the more important of these opposition movements. The first occurred toward the close of President Diaz's first term in office and was a movement having for its purpose the re-election of Lerdo, who, upon Diaz's capture of the power, had fled to the United States. The movement had not time to gain any headway and come out in the open before
