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.