Page:Mexico and its reconstruction.djvu/53

Rh the administration of justice there exists nothing but a vain pretense, and public morality has passed into the category of unrealizable dreams.

To remedy such conditions President Diaz at once set his hand. The army was the instrument on which he relied. One of the developments with which he was best satisfied at the end of his first term was the "great and undoubted progress. . . made in the organization of an efficient police, both metropolitan and rural; the latter being distributed not only in the federal district but throughout the various states of the republic. Throughout his period of control the President continued to rely on the military power as the factor that should keep the nation in equilibrium.

The emphasis of the policy of policing the country by forces increasingly under the control of the central government, of itself emphasized the executive functions of that government. The ignorance of the people and their inexperience in self-governing institutions prompted doubts as to the possibility of truly popular elections and as to the advisability of entrusting more than the form of power to legislators or judges who might be selected by them. As a result, to protect itself, the executive and the small circle that surrounded him came to consider it a necessity not only to control the administration local and central, partly through the political organization and partly through the army but also to take from the legislature and the courts any real