Until 1876, when upon his distracted country Porfirio Diaz, innkeeper's son and born ruler, descended as _deus ex machina_, the state of Mexico may be summed up in the words "rapine, murder, and sudden death." But though Mexico has had--and the bulk of her population has had reason during the past thirty years to thank her lucky stars for him--an "Iron Master," the quietude of the country is only skin-deep. Law and order is represented by a blend of a rough-and-ready justice, a sort of legalised lynch-law, with an official law-administration venal to a high degree. With every second mestizo a born robber, Mexico is no place for tedious processes with remands and committals to Assizes. A man caught red-handed is usually dealt with on the spot. Such a case occurred while we were visiting the capital. Two days after we had travelled on the marvellous mountain railway, the guards of the day-train (which by the way always takes the bullion to the coast and has a carriage-load of soldiers attached as military convoy) saw, as they approached the steepest descent, two fellows loitering on the line, presumably wreckers. The train was stopped and the guards and the officer commanding the convoy gave chase, and, coming up with the men, shot them with their revolvers and kicked the bodies down the precipice. The sun and the vultures do the rest, and on the re-arrival of the train in the capital the matter may or may not be formally notified to the Government. Even to the casual observer the difficulty of governing Mexico must seem inexpressibly great. President Diaz has succeeded not so much because he does not know what mercy means or because a rifle bullet is his only answer for those who question his authority, but because he is endowed with superhuman tact. The iron heel, like that of Achilles, has its vulnerable spot if pressed too hard upon a people's throat, and so he has little dodges by which he appears to his subjects to exercise a judicious clemency. If some redoubtable criminal is captured, some monarch of murderers, Diaz knows well that among his thousands of crime-loving fellow-countrymen the brute will have a large following. His execution will mean the declaration of a vendetta against the police. So he is put on his trial, condemned to death, and within twenty-four hours the President commutes his sentence to one of twenty years' incarceration in the Penitentiary. After about a week there, he is taken out one evening, as usual, into the prison yard for exercise under a small guard of soldiers. One of these sidles up to him and suggests that as the night is dark he might make a bolt for it. The convict believes it a genuine offer, sprints off, and is dropped at thirty yards like a rabbit by the five or six soldiers who have been waiting under the shadow of the further wall. The next morning the official newspaper states, "Last night the notorious criminal So and So, to whom His Excellency the President recently extended clemency, made an