Page:About Mexico - Past and Present.djvu/293

Rh liberty which after a lapse of more than forty years has ended in its complete overthrow.

It would be perplexing and unsatisfactory to trace the varying fortunes of those professed friends of Freedom in Mexico who

The story of Benito Juarez, the reformer of Mexico, will give all needed details of its revolutionary struggles and show that, as liberty there had its birthplace in the heart of one Indian, so it reached its glorious consummation through the undying and incorruptible patriotism of another.

Benito Juarez was a pure-blooded Zapotec Indian, born in 1806 in the little village of San Pablo Guetatao, among the mountains of Oaxaca. His tribe held the lands of its fathers and maintained a sturdy independence during three hundred years of colonial oppression. This was one of the tribes before whom the proud Aztecs trembled. A few of the men now spoke Spanish well enough to do business when they took their produce to market, but the women and children understood only their old Indian tongue. Young Juarez thus grew up in the atmosphere of the past. The simple herdmen among whom he lived went on the even tenor of their way when Hidalgo raised the standard of independence among the uprooted vines and mulberry trees of his parish, though their hearts were no doubt stirred with the thought that it was an Indian's hand which had lifted their trailing banner, and that one of the same despised race might yet plant it beyond the reach of a Spaniard's grasp.