The "era of glorious progress"--to use the Mexican term--which the long dictatorship of the present famous President of Mexico inaugurated is a theme which occupies the Mexican mind and pen very largely. The European writer ungrudgingly records it, and the much-used adjective has much of truth for its constant use. General Porfirio Diaz has been wise and fortunate, and has been able to surround his administration with the talented men of his time--_una pleiade incontable de hombres conspicuos_, to quote from a Mexican description of his colleagues--"an innumerable pleiades of conspicuous men!" in their own grandiloquent phrases. As for the President, it might be supposed that the tendency to deify him by his contemporaries, and the constant pouring out of adulation and flattery upon him for the last twenty years, has made him proof against the workings of vanity. He well deserves this praise, both from his countrymen and from foreigners; but so long and varied a course of it must prove unpalatable, notwithstanding that the Spanish-American, as a rule, is capable of absorbing an infinite amount of praise. Porfirio Diaz has brought his country up from chaos, and for this fortunate work he has to thank his own staunch character and the fact that a time had arrived in the natural evolution of America when even the most turbulent States are called upon to perform their function and carry out their destiny. The man and the hour arrived together, and Diaz deserves to rank among the historic statesmen of the world. The Mexicans, in their oratory and writings, are still congratulating themselves upon their overthrow of the power of the Church, and of the other ancient tyrannies which were a bar to their progress as a modern nation. But the tendency--though growing less as time goes on--is to overrate this. They pride themselves on being "modern," and congratulate themselves on every occasion upon having destroyed past traditions. But it is easy, in wiping away the evils of the past with too vigorous a hand, to destroy at the same time much that is of good report. Mexico possesses traditions, religious influences, historical and literary associations which are of great value, and possessed by no other American community upon that continent. These can never be replaced by the plumed hat of the General and all that it conveys, nor by the freethinker, nor by the factory whistle and overalled mechanic, nor, indeed, by the elements of a strenuous commercialism generally. As time goes on and civil life broadens and develops this attitude will be moderated--it is but a phase of the country's history, and indeed a healthy one, to cry for progress and the modern spirit.