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280, that $10,000 reward had been offered for the capture of its editor, Praxedis Guerrero, that secret service men in pursuit of that reward had seized subscription books of the paper and from the books had secured names of men who would be at once proceeded against.

During the past three years persecution of this general character has directly caused the suspension of at least ten newspapers printed in Spanish along the border for Mexican readers.

To each of these persecutions and press suppressions there is an interesting story attached, but to attempt to detail all of them would require too great a proportion of this work. I shall detail but one case, that of Ricardo Flores Magon, president of the Liberal Party, and his immediate associates. This case, as well as being the most important of all, is typical. Its difference from the rest has been chiefly that Magon, having been able to gather about him greater resources, has been able to make a longer and more desperate fight for his life and liberty than others of his countrymen who have been singled out for persecution. For six and one-half years Magon has been in this country and during nearly the whole of that time he has been engaged in trying to escape being sent back to death beyond the Rio Grande. More than one-half of that time he has passed in American prisons, and for no other reason than that he is opposed to Diaz and his system of slavery and despotism.

The worst that can be said of Magon—as of any of his followers whom I know—is that he desires to bring about an armed rebellion against the established government of Mexico. In cases where reformers are given the opportunity of urging their reforms by democratic