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54 wall against another, to go to war with its neighbours, or to issue paper money or make alliances, or, in short, so to act that the general commonwealth might be jeopardised.

Up to the time of the Revolution the workings of the constitution, so far as the States serving the federal capital were concerned, were exceedingly harmonious; in fact, the manner in which they adhered to the federal government was an eloquent testimony to the virtues inherent in such a form of political administration, where the evils of rule from a distant centre were obviated and the blessings of local government fully reaped.

It would be idle, however, to pretend that in some of the more distant States disaffection had not reared its head. Especially was this the case in the Northern State of Chihuahua, where the great land-owning family of the Terrazas aroused the spirit of revolution by acts of peonage and exactions of an extreme character. There were, too, other causes which contributed to disloyalty on the part of the more distant States. In Latin-American Republics the system of "the spoils to the victors" in matters political is carried out with rigorous exactitude; and those persons of influence, who are left in the cold shades of opposition, are usually totally excluded from all participation in the life of the country. Under the régime of Diaz, this policy was perhaps more rigidly enforced than ever before in the history of Mexico. Diaz surrounded himself by a band of statesmen whose interests were identical with his own, and who formed perhaps as solid an oligarchy as Latin-America had ever known. This Cabinet was known to its opponents as the Grupo Cientifico, or "knowing ones," and there is little doubt now, that although these men toiled, in a sense, for the real good of the country, that they exercised a kind of tyranny peculiarly distasteful to the more liberal-minded section of the Mexican public. The result of this species of administration we will deal with later in the chapters devoted to the revolutionary movement.