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THE CRUSHING OF OPPOSITION PARTIES

Men and women on our continent are daily suffering death, imprisonment or exile for contending for those political rights which we have considered as ours since the birth of our country, rights of free speech, of free press, the right of assembly, the right to vote to decide who shall hold the political offices and govern the land, the right to be secure in person and property. For these things hundreds of men and women have died within the past twelve months, tens of thousands within the past thirty years, in a country divided from ours only by a shallow river and an imaginary geographical line.

In Mexico today are being lived life stories such as carry one's imagination back to the days of the French Revolution and the times when constitutional government, that giant which was destined to complete the change from the Middle Ages to Modernity, was being born. In those days men yielded up their lives for republicanism. Men are doing the same today in Mexico. The repressive part of the Diaz governmental machine which I described in the last previous chapter—the army, the rurales, the ordinary police, the secret police, the acordada—are perhaps one-fifth for protection against common criminals and four-fifths for the suppression of democratic movements among the people. The deadly certainty of this repressive machine