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
