to tell the truth. They are really sent by the governors of the respective states, and these governors have been manipulated in advance. Porfirio can undoubtedly make threats as well as promises; and an unlucky representative, if content to forego a better place, may even lose the one he has. He cannot depend upon adequate support, either, should he have a notion to resist. The "boys" are much given to "going back" on one another in Mexican history.
I shall be found fault with by some persons, as likely as not, for undue severity. He is a beneficent Caesar, after all, compared with former times; he has brought back something like a Golden Age; he oppresses nobody, at least, not the foreigners, and gives a stimulus to every worthy enterprise.
So be it; and probably there is no more genial government than a Caesarism of the beneficent sort, fairly established. But it is too full of dangers. Porfirio is doing nothing to educate the nation. "In effect," one of his own papers says to him, "it is not alone with railways that a nation so disorganized as ours can reconstitute itself; not alone the locomotive and the telegraph that can make us happy. There should emanate from the regions of power something like an impulse of obedience to the law and observance of the institutions upon which the social and political well-being of the country rests."
It is not probable that there will soon again be serious disturbances. "All the grabbers have got places," say some critics of a cynical turn, "and there will be no more revolutions." A better saying, however, is current: "A bad government is preferable to a good revolution." There is a weariness of fighting. The country seems to savor the little-known luxury of peace with a positive
