The present book relates in vivid and graphic words the history of Mexico during the time that it served as a milch cow to the insatiable Spanish kings and their satellites. But for the gold and silver that came in the fleet from New Spain, when, indeed, it was not captured by English or Dutch rovers, the gigantic imposition of Spanish power in Europe could not have been maintained even as a pretence throughout the greater part of the seventeenth century as it was. For nearly three centuries one set of greedy Viceroys and high officials after another settled from the mother country upon unresisting Mexico and sucked its blood like vampires. Some of them, it is true, made attempts to palliate their rapacity by the introduction of improved methods of agriculture, mining, and the civilised arts, and Mexico, in close touch with Spain, was not allowed, as the neighbouring Spanish territory of the isthmus was, to sink into utter stagnation. The efforts of the Count of Tendilla to keep his Viceroyalty abreast of his times in the mid sixteenth century are still gratefully remembered, as is the name of his successor Velasco, who struck a stout blow for the freedom of the native Indians enslaved in the mines, and emancipated 150,000 of them. But on the whole, especially after the establishment of the Inquisition in Mexico, the story of the Spanish domination is generally one of greed, oppression, and injustice, alternating with periods of enlightened effort on the part of individual viceroys more high-minded than their fellows.
With the early nineteenth century came the stirring of a people long crushed into impotence. The mother country was in the throes of a great war against the foreign invader. Deserted and abandoned by its Spanish sovereign, and ruled, where it was ruled at all by civilians, by a body of self-elected revolutionary doctrinaires, the colonists of the various Viceroyalties of America promptly shook themselves free from the nerveless grasp that had held them so long. A demand for an immense sum of money beyond that which had voluntarily been sent by Mexico to aid the mother country against Napoleon was refused in 1810, and a few months afterwards the long gathering storm burst. The man who first formulated the Mexican cry for freedom was a priest, one Miguel Hidalgo. He had already organised a widespread revolutionary propaganda, and on September 16, 1810, the Viceregal authorities precipitated matters by suppressing one of the clubs, at Querétaro, in which the independence of the country was advocated. Hidalgo at once called his followers to arms, and under the sacred banner of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the patron saint of Mexico, led some 50,000 ardent patriots through the country towards the capital that had once been Montezuma's. Subduing all the land he crossed, Hidalgo finally met the royal troops on the 30th of October and completely routed them. Then the rebel army gradually fell to pieces in consequence of unskilful management, and at a subsequent battle in January, 1811, was entirely defeated, Hidalgo and his lieutenant being shortly afterwards captured and shot.
But the fire thus lit could never again be entirely extinguished. For years the intermittent struggle went on under another priest, Morelos, a true national Mexican hero who was betrayed to the Spaniards in 1815, and punished first by the Inquisition as a heretic and afterwards shot as a traitor to the King of Spain. The sun of the Spanish domination of Mexico set in blood, for the wretched reactionary Ferdinand VII. was on the throne of the mother country, determined if he could to terrorise Spanish America into obedience as he had done Spain itself. His eagerness to do so defeated itself. A large army, collected at Cadiz for the purpose of crushing Mexico into obedience, revolted against the despot, and then the Mexican patriots, under Iturbide, practically dominated their country. The new Spanish Hibernian Viceroy, O'Dontroju, could but bend his head to the storm, and in September, 1821, signed a treaty with the insurgents by which Mexico was acknowledged to be an independent constitutional monarchy under the Spanish king, Ferdinand VII.
Such a solution of a great national uprising could only be temporary. The Spanish Government refused to ratify the agreement arrived at for Mexico's independence, and a barrack pronouncement acclaimed Agustin Iturbide Emperor of Mexico in June, 1822. The empire of Iturbide lasted less than a year, for the man was unworthy, and Mexican patriots had not fought and bled for ten years against one despotism for the purpose of handing themselves over to another. Iturbide was deposed and exiled, and on his return for the purpose of raising his standard afresh in Mexico, in 1824 the ex-Emperor was shot as an enemy to the peace and tranquillity of his country.
The Republic of Mexico obtained the cordial support of England and the United States, and when in 1825 the last Spanish man-at-arms retired from the fortress of San Juan de Ulua, off Vera Cruz, all Spanish-Americans on the two continents were free to work out their own destiny. As was the case with the other Republics, inexperience in the science of government and attempts to force the pace of progress, condemned Mexico to fifty years of turbulence and alternating despotism and license. Ambitious soldiers strove with each other for the place of highest honour and profit. Texas, resenting the instability of Creole government, separated from the Mexican States after a devastating war.
Amongst the higher classes of Mexicans the monarchical tradition which had prompted the experiment of Iturbide's evanescent empire had not entirely died out, and in 1840 a leading Mexican statesman, Estrada, argued in an open letter that the republican form of government having failed to secure peace to the country, it would be advisable to establish a Mexican monarchy with a member of one of the old ruling houses of Europe at its head. But the stormy petrel of Mexican politics, General Saint Anna, pervaded the scene yet for many years more; and in 1847 engaged in a disastrous war with the United States on the subject of the Texan boundary, in which California was lost to Mexico. In the meanwhile the suggestion that a monarchical experiment should be tried never died out; and when in 1860 the country was a prey to civil war between the anti-clericals under the great Juarez and the Conservative elements, and the interest on the foreign debt was suspended, a pretext offered for the intervention of France, England, and Spain in the internal affairs of Mexico, supported by the Conservative and monarchical parties in the country itself.
The ill-starred ambition of Napoleon III. ended in the sacrifice of a chivalrous and well-meaning prince, but it effected for Mexico what fifty years of internal strife had been unable to attain: it produced a solidarity of Mexican national feeling which has since then welded the people into a stable and united nation, in no danger henceforward of falling a prey to foreign ambition or of lapsing into anarchy from its own dissensions. That this happy end has been attained has been due mainly to the genius of two men, the greatest of Mexico's sons, who have in succession appeared at the moment when the national crisis needed them. To Benito Juarez, the Zapoteca Indian, who held aloft the banner of Mexican independence against the power of Napoleon's empire, is due not alone the victory over the invaders but the firm establishment of a federal constitutional system. Juarez, a lawyer and a judge, insisted upon the law being supreme, and that ambitious generals should thenceforward be the servants and not the masters of the State.
The great Juarez died in 1872, and for the last thirty-three years, with a break of one short interval only, Porfirio Diaz has been master of Mexico, a benevolent autocrat, an emperor in all but name, governing with a wise moderation which recognises that a country situated as Mexico is, and with a population as yet far from homogeneous or civilised in the European sense, must of necessity be led patiently and diplomatically along the road of progress. To reach the goal of material and moral elevation at which Diaz aims, stability of institutions and of directors is the first need; and the President has been re-elected seven times by his fellow citizens because they, as well as he, can see that his brain and his hand must guide the mighty engine of advance that he has set in motion.
The effects of this policy have already been prodigious, and there is probably no country on earth that has made strides so gigantic as Mexico in the last thirty years. It is due mainly to the labours of Diaz that the national finance has been placed upon a firm and satisfactory basis; to him are owing the extraordinary public works which have completed the vast system of drainage of the Valley of Mexico, initiated nearly three centuries ago; by him the Republic has been covered by a network of primary and secondary public schools rivalling those of the most advanced European countries. One of the most beneficent of the President's recent acts has been the rehabilitation in 1905 of the Mexican silver currency, by which a fairly stable standard exchange value is secured for the national coinage; the silver dollar fluctuating now within very narrow limits, the normal value being one half of a United States dollar.
The constructive work of this really great man, indeed, is as yet difficult to appraise. It covers nearly every branch of national activity, and it is only by comparison with a past state of affairs that anything like an adequate idea of the progress effected can be formed. In 1876 the population of the Republic was 9,300,000; it is now about 19,000,000. The increase in the length of railways constructed in the same period is equally remarkable, rising from 367 miles in 1876 to 15,000 miles in 1908. The railways hitherto have been mainly built by English and United States capitalists, and are in a great measure still managed by English-speaking officers; but the important Transatlantic line, which connects the port of Coatzacoalcos on the Atlantic side with Salina Cruz on the Pacific, is a national undertaking carried out under contract by a great English contracting firm. The future of this Tehuantepec railway promises to be of the highest importance as connecting Europe and America with the Far East. The geographical situation of the line is more central than that of Panama, ensuring, for instance, a saving of nearly a thousand miles between Liverpool and Yokohama. The railway itself across the isthmus is under two hundred miles in length, and the ports on both sides are capacious enough to deal with the greatest ships afloat.