Page:Barbarous Mexico.djvu/191

Rh of Diaz is probably not equaled anywhere in the world, not even in Russia. I remember a trusted Mexican official once summing up to me the feeling of the Mexican people, taught them by experience, on this thing. Said he: "It is possible that a murderer may escape the police here, that a highwayman may get away, but a political offender never—it is not possible for one to escape!"

I myself have observed numerous instances of the deadly fear in which the secret police and the government assassin are held even by those who would seem to have no cause for fear. Notable among these is the panic which overtook the family of a friend with whom I was staying—his brother, sister, sister-in-law and nephew and niece—when the secret police surrounded their house in the capital and waited for my friend to come out. They were middle-class Mexicans of the most intelligent sort, this family, very well known and highly respected, and yet their fright was pitiful. Now they dashed this way and that, now to a window and now to a door, wringing their hands. Now they huddled together, verbally painting the dire calamities that were sure to descend not only upon the hunted one, but upon their own heads because he had been found with them. My friend had committed no crime. He had not been identified with the revolutionists, he had merely expressed sympathy for them, and yet his family could see nothing but death for him. And after the fugitive had escaped by jumping through a window and climbing over house-tops, the head of the family, speaking of his own danger, said to me: "I myself may go to jail for a time while they try to compel me to tell where my brother is hiding. If I do not go it will be only because the government has decided to respect me for