Page:Mexico, California and Arizona - 1900.djvu/165

 cause for which I fought. I cannot deny that I hold them still. I take the consequences. I have pawned my valuables and clothing for food. If I rust in idleness it is because I have no occupation to turn to."

"I admire your manliness," the President replied.

"Here is your appointment to the command of a regiment. Your cause is dead, as you know, and cannot be revived. I ask of you no political services. I ask of you only to be as before—a soldier."

It is needless to say that after this there was at least one Lerdist the less.

I do not wish to be understood as finding fault with this policy of astute conciliation; far from it. The hammer-and-tongs method has been so long in vogue that it is a delightful relief. The chicanery of matrimonial alliances, and assumption of frank and soldierly manners, will be welcomed by all the foreign capital in the country as a great improvement upon throat-cutting.

From vast estates in Oaxaca, which with a commendable economy he has amassed meantime, the Mexican Warwick, controls the destinies of his country with an ease like moving one's little finger. He pleases himself in the interim to be governor, and commander of the forces, of this fighting state. In the absence of any efficient electoral system the country is under his absolute dictatorship; while, with the ostensible division of powers, there is no way of tracing the responsibility to its source. Not that there is the least danger of anybody's trying to do so. There are apparent Brutuses in both Houses of Congress, orators and poets who have turned off many a diatribe and many an ode to freedom on the best classic and French republican models, but they have nothing to say against this Caesar. They are not very free agents,