The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 21: The Recent Days (1910-1914)
History
The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 21: The Recent Days (1910-1914)
World history
A hundred instances could be cited of the automobile's aid to the farm.
One will suffice. In times of harvest, when a big gang is at work, the
breakdown of a thresher will stop operations for a whole day, if the
farmer has to drive to town behind a horse to get needed parts. With an
automobile, he can dash in and out in a few hours.
No one expects the automobile to replace the horse on the farm. But for
work that the horse can not do efficiently--such as the quick transit
of milk, butter, and garden products to the markets--the motor-car has
a future of wide utility. Incidentally, the farmer may be the first to
solve the fuel problem, for by means of cooperative distilling he could
produce denatured alcohol for almost nothing.
The more you go into the study of the automobile on the farm, the
bigger becomes its significance. In the United States, four hundred and
twenty-five million acres of land are uncultivated, largely on account
of their inaccessibility. The motor-car will make them more accessible.
Through the wide use of automobiles by the farmer we shall get, in
time, that most valuable agency for prosperity, the good road.
One emerges from an investigation of the automobile industry in wonder
over its expansion, and with admiration for the men behind it.
Clear-cut youth, fresh vigor, compelling action galvanize it. Yet what
seems to be a miracle at the end of less than ten years of growth may
only be the prelude to a vaster era.
Meanwhile, each day records a new chapter of its triumphant progress.
THE DOWNFALL OF DIAZ
MEXICO PLUNGES INTO REVOLUTION
A.D. 1911
MRS. E.A. TWEEDIE
DOLORES BUTTERFIELD
On May 25, 1911, Porfirio Diaz resigned the Presidency of Mexico, under
the compulsion of a revolution headed by Francisco Madero. This act
ended an era, the Diaz era, in Mexican history. Diaz had been President
for over thirty years. He had found Mexico an impoverished barbarism;
he raised it to be a wealthy and at least outwardly civilized state.
Some able critics, even among Europeans, had declared that Diaz, "the
grand old man," was the greatest leader of the past century. All
Mexicans honored him. But unfortunately for his fame he grew too old:
he outlived his wisdom and his power.
Of the downfall of such a man there must naturally be conflicting
views. We give here the story from the pathetic Diaz side by a
well-known English writer upon Mexico, Mrs. Tweedie. Then we give the
warm picture of Madero's heroic struggle against tyranny, as it
appeared to Dolores Butterfield, a young lady brought up in Mexico, but
driven thence by the more recent revolution which resulted in Madero's
death.
MRS. E. A. TWEEDIE
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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