Porfirio Diaz sold out his country to foreigners for a pittance, he made them rich and prosperous, and he used Mexican labor, freedom, and their suffering to raise himself on a pinnacle of fame unheard of to any other man of his times. Mexico was only Mexico, but Diaz was its prophet, its savior, its creator, its superman, and demi-god. The Mexicans were an unknown, negligible quantity and quality, and the fatal pseudo-greatness of Diaz was trumpeted across the world by an army corps of foreign concessionaries, exploiters and grafters. But the great Diaz myth like a monstrous Frankenstein destroyed itself in time. CHAPTER III THE MADERO REVOLUTION, ITS AIMS AND FAILURES In the summer of 1908, when the writer was in Mexico he had heard that a man called F. I. Madero was writing a book, in which he discussed the advisability of contesting the seventh presidential election of General Diaz. The book was supposed to have been written in collaboration with a journalist who later was rewarded with the Governorship of Chiapas. “The Presidential Question of 1910,” the title of the book, had about ninety thousand words of written matter, and began with the War of Independence down to General Diaz’s régime when he tried to analyze the future political conduct of Diaz. Of the interview of General Diaz in _Pearson’s Magazine_ of 1908, he said: “We judge a study of his declarations to Creelman useless, as we do not believe they are sincere, for they are in manifest contradiction with his past acts, as General Diaz has always made promises which were never kept, from the Plan of la Noria down to the last one.” Although few intelligent Mexicans took General Diaz at his word, they nevertheless caught him for the first time in a flagrant political “faux pas” for not having denied the interview. They saw a chance to take him at his own words and start the work of organizing an agitation of the political conscience of Mexico. Madero’s book was a powerful factor in this propaganda, which was followed by a national organization of political clubs and speechmaking by a few daring young men of the middle class. This fearless, open propaganda copied the campaigning methods of the United States and Madero was the head of the movement. At first, Diaz, his political supporters and even the foreigners laughed at their rash, foolish crusade which they thought would soon be crushed and destroyed.