announcement of Diaz that he had decided to continue in power for still another term a fourth one. An attempt was made to organize a movement in opposition, but it was beaten down by clubs and guns. Ricardo Flores Magon, the political refugee, took a student's part in this movement and was one of the many who suffered imprisonment for it. The choice of the opposition for presidency was Dr. Ignacio Martinez. Dr. Martinez was compelled to flee the country, and after a period spent in Europe he settled in Laredo, Texas, where he edited a newspaper in opposition to President Diaz. One evening Dr. Martinez was waylaid and shot down by a horseman who immediately afterwards crossed into Mexico and was seen to enter army barracks on the other side. It is a pretty well authenticated fact that on the night of the assassination the governor of the state of Nuevo Leon, who was at that time recognized as Diaz's right-hand man in the border states, received a telegram saying: "Your order obeyed."
The only movement which Diaz ever permitted to gain much headway in the matter of organization was the Liberal Party. The Liberal Party sprang into birth in the fall of 1900, after all danger of effective opposition against the dictator's entering upon a sixth term had been obviated. A speech delivered in Paris by the Bishop of San Luis Potosi, in which the priest declared that, in spite of the constitution and the laws of Mexico, the church in that country was in a most flourishing and satisfactory condition, was the immediate cause of the organization. Mexicans of all classes saw greater danger to the national welfare in the renascence of a church heirarchy than they did even in a dictatorship by a single individual, for death must some day end the rule of the man, while the life of the church is endless. They
