The Great Events by Famous Historians

Thus in each state a small group of men were the absolute masters politically, economically, and industrially. They made and unmade the laws at their pleasure. For instance, Terrazas imposed a prohibitory tax upon cattle which forced the small owners to dispose of their stock, which he, being the only purchaser, bought at his own price, after which he repealed the law. They adjusted taxation to suit themselves, assessing their own huge estates at figures nothing short of ridiculous, while levying heavily upon the small farmer, and especially upon enterprise and improvements. They practised peonage, though peonage is contrary to the Constitution of the Republic, to the Federal laws, and, in many cases, to the laws of the separate states as well. They drew public salaries for perverting the government to their private benefit and enrichment; and as the dictator grew older and surrendered to his satellites more and more of his once absolute power, the conditions became so intolerable, and the tyranny and greed of the Cientificos so shameless and unbridled (infinitely more so in the southern than in the northern states), that it would have been a reversal of the history of the world if there had been no revolution.

In 1910 the aged Diaz declared his intention of resigning. Perhaps he even intended to keep that promise when he made it; but if so, the Cientificos, who knew that his prestige and the love of the nation for him were their only shield, induced him to think better of it. The strongest of the opposing parties was the Anti-reelectionist party. It embodied the best elements and the best ideals of the country and from the first was the one of which the Diaz regime was most afraid.

Now by its very name this party was pledged to no reelection, and yet it so far compromised with the regime as to nominate Diaz for President, only repudiating Corral, who was odious to the entire nation. However, the Cientificos saw that this was to be the entering wedge, and they promptly prepared to crush the new political faction. Anti-reelectionists were arrested right and left; their newspapers were suppressed, the presses wrecked, and the editors thrown into prison. But the party's blood was up. It did not dissolve. It did not nominate Corral. Instead it struck Porfirio Diaz's name from its ticket and tendered to Francisco Madero, Jr., not the vice-presidential but the presidential nomination. The bare fact that he accepted it speaks volumes for his courage.

Francisco Madero was born October 4, 1873. He was educated from childhood in the United States and Europe; and upon returning to his country, imbued with the advanced ideas of the most broad-minded men of the most enlightened countries in the world, it was perhaps only natural that he should resent the conditions which he saw in his own country. The Madero family owns great tracts of land in Coahuila, besides properties in other states. Madero introduced modern methods and modern machinery in the management of his estates. Already a millionaire, he made more millions, at the same time doing much toward the betterment of conditions for his own immediate dependents among the lower class.

Madero first attracted attention by writing The Presidential Succession in 1910. The Cientifico clique laughed at him as a visionary. Suddenly they awoke to the fact that his book, with its calm, dispassionate logic and democratic tone, was doing them more harm than a thousand soldiers, and they suppressed its publication. It was the writing of this book that led to Madero's nomination for President by the Anti-reelectionist party when every one else had failed it.

Madero took the attitude that he was a presidential candidate in a free republic and began what he called his democratic campaign. He went from city to city, delivering speeches and laying his platform before the people. He was called "the apostle of democracy," and the multitudes followed him like an apostle indeed. But he did not carry out his democratic campaign without sacrifice and risk. When he passed through Hermosillo, Sonora, the hotel-keepers closed their-doors to him. Torres, feudal lord of the state, had given out the necessary hint and Madero, for all his millions, could find no apartments for himself and his wife until a Spaniard—relying upon the fact of being a foreigner— offered them lodgings, "not wishing to lend himself to so ignoble an intrigue." This was but one city of many. In all places he had the most tremendous difficulty in renting halls for his addresses. Frequently he was reduced to speaking in tumble-down sheds or mule-yards or vacant lots, the local authorities often hiring rowdies to create disturbances at his meetings. He was ridiculed, he was threatened, he was persecuted, but he went on unafraid.