The country was disorganised, its credit in the European markets was destroyed; its national finances were in disorder. The blood-stained soil was divided among petty _caciques_; radicalism led to demagogy and liberty to anarchy. Jacobinism had triumphed with the Revolution, and condemned the re-election of presidents and the conservative Senate; the omnipotence of the popular Chamber was proclaimed. The result was a feeble and ephemeral government; in the absence of a moderating power the radical Assembly was supreme. A man was needed to organise chaos; Porfirio Diaz was the necessary autocrat, the "representative man" of Emerson. Stern and gloomy, he was preparing for the priesthood. Born in 1830, he was brought up in poverty. A half-breed, he combined the courage of the Iberian with the dissimulation of the native. He knew the efficacy of work, perseverance, and method; he was extremely ignorant, but was shrewd and perspicacious. He was six times elected President, for the last time in 1900, and peace was coterminous {158} with his rule. A great hunter and a master of manly exercises, his intensity of will-power was supported by solid physical foundations. Above all he was a man of action; his character was served by a robust organisation; a powerful frame and a vast power of resistance enabled him to rule and to intimidate. His intelligence applied itself to concrete things; it was unable to examine facts in the transforming light of an ideal; he had no general ideas, no spacious plans; he was slow in deliberation and rapid in action. His politics were an organised Machiavellism; like Louis XL, he divided that he might reign and dissembled that he might conquer. His ideas of government were simple: "Not much politics and plenty of administration," said his deeds and his programmes. Machiavelli, in _The Prince_, taught the means of ruling in states which have had autonomous governments; he suggested the implacable extermination of the reigning families. General Diaz followed this counsel in part. To overcome anarchy he attacked the obscure tyrants of the provinces, and had them shot or exiled, or else he attached them to himself by means of honours and rewards. He imposed peace by means of terror. He knew that order was the practical basis of progress, as in the formula of Comte, which the Mexicans are fond of quoting, and this order he firmly established. The destruction of the revolutionary instinct constituted the negative side of his work; Diaz built upon this foundation an industrial republic, practical and laborious. Weary of barren ideologies, he put the Reformation and its Jacobin doctrines out of his mind, accepted and encouraged the Yankee influence which had made Lerdo de Tejada so uneasy, conquered barbarism and the desert by means of the railway, and raised a number of loans. He was the president of an industrial epoch. {159}