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Rh commercial aspects, appeared to have been one of long-continued progress. But at the age of 80, President Diaz, who entered upon his eighth term of Presidential office in June, 1910, did "not consider his life-work as over, and still continued to keep hold upon the conduct of public affairs.

In youth a brilliant, soldierly figure, his courage and intrepid generalship secured for him the whole-hearted idolatry of the people from whose ranks he had sprung. One of those who chafed at the theatrical ineptitudes of the unhappy Emperor Maximilian, he was placed in command of a Republican army levied in the North-Western provinces, and at once distinguished himself by the masterly manner in which he took the city of Puebla by storm. He then proceeded to the reduction of the capital itself, which he speedily occupied. His military reputation and the popular enthusiasm evoked by his personality aroused in him political ambitions. His struggle with the Lerdists has already been outlined. His whole life resolved itself into a continuous conflict with Lerdo, who proved his implacable foe. Lerdo became President, and directed the entire power of his influence against his rival, whose desperate adventures and hairbreadth escapes from the pitfalls of his enemy read like a chapter from the annals of the old Spanish Conquistadores. But the fittest survived. The natural power in Diaz asserted itself, and in the last struggle which threatened to involve all connected with it in universal ruin, the soldier proved successful over the statesman, whom he thrust from the country a beaten and broken man. The odds which Diaz had to confront in this last struggle, his overthrow of them, and the moderation which he showed subsequent to the defeat of his enemies, gave him a place among the household names of Mexico, and enshrined him in the popular heart.

But the strife through which he had just passed was but the prelude to still more strenuous labour. He found Mexico on the verge of national insolvency, her markets starved by