Page:Barbarous Mexico.djvu/280

248 the first extended criticism of Diaz and his system to be put squarely before the American people. And the reason for its being the first will be not because there have not been facts that begged to be printed and writers that desired to print those facts, but because of that "skillfully applied influence upon journalism" which General Diaz exerts in our land of free speech and free press.

Again I come back to the question: What is the source of that "influence upon journalism?" Why do citizens of the United States, who profess a reverence for the principles for which their forefathers of '76 fought, who claim to revere Abraham Lincoln most of all for his Emancipation Proclamation, who shudder at the labor-baiting of the Congo, at the horrors of Russia's Siberia, at the political system of Czar Nicholas, apologize for and defend a more cruel slavery, a worse political oppression, a more complete and terrible despotism—in Mexico?

To this question there is only one conceivable answer, that for the sake of sordid profits principles of decency and humanity, principles which are universally conceded as being best for the progress of the world, have been set aside.

By this I do not mean that all of the Americans who have expressed admiration for General Diaz have been directly bribed to do so by gifts of so many dollars and so many cents. By no means. Some publishers and some writers have undoubtedly been bought in this way. But the vast majority of the active flatterers of Diaz have been moved by nothing more than "business reasons," which, by some persons, will be considered as little different from bribery. As to the great mass of the