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O GOOD purpose would be served by the foregoing recital of incompetence, fatuity, and crime unless it led to an understanding of the underlying causes of Mexico's woes in order that a remedy may be found and applied. A short cut to enlightenment may be found in a brief résumé of events since the patriot priest, Hidalgo, rang the grito, or alarm, upon the bells of his little church at Dolores in 1810 to call together a few friends to begin the revolt against the intolerable oppression of Spain which cost the mother country what had been her most important dependency in the new world for nearly three hundred years. After eleven years of conflict, in the second year of which Hidalgo paid with his life the penalty of his patriotism, Mexico, in 1821, established her independence and began her career as a self-governing nation under a form of democracy.

In the ninety-eight years that have elapsed since then there has hardly been a year, except during