Page:Mexico, California and Arizona - 1900.djvu/160

 Since he is, by general admission, the power behind the throne, the Mexican "Warwick," the President who has been, is, and is to be, let us inquire a little also who he was. "His influence in the country," says the Monitor, "is decisive, incontestable. Something more than Benitez in the past, he is not only the great commoner, but the one man of the present."

Porfirio Diaz was born in Oaxaca, in 1830. His family destined him for the law, but he took to soldiering instead. Beginning as a private, he entered the city of Mexico as general-in-chief of the forces which wrested it from the French. Once in these wars, when a prisoner at Puebla, he let himself down by a rope from a tower and made his escape. His career is studded with romantic incidents, but the career of what Mexican leader is not?

The Latin race admires the military type, and "Don Porfirio," or more familiarly "Porfirio," as the people delight to call him, bethought him to turn his prestige in the field to account. He offered himself for the Presidency against Juarez, on the platform of no re-election, in 1871. Lerdo de Tejada, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, was also in the field as a third candidate. By the Mexican system one elector is supposed to be chosen for each district of five hundred inhabitants. In actual practice the bulk of the inhabitants hardly know when the election takes place, and the electors represent scarcely more than themselves in the 12,361 votes of the electoral college thus constituted. Juarez received 5837, Diaz 3555, Lerdo 2874, and 95 are recorded as "scattering." "Q.—Relate to me what happened thereafter.

"A.—General Porfirio Diaz issued, from his hacienda of La Noria, a manifesto, hence called the Plan of La