One Hundred Years of Mexican Independence

EDITOR'S TABLE. 233 I have gone the whole round of creation: I saw and spoke; I, a work of God's hand for that purpose, received into my brain And pronounced on the rest of his handiwork—returned him again His creation's approval or censure; I spoke as I saw, Reported, as man may of God's work—all is love, yet all's law. "Mormonism" stands for the highest standard of intelligence. Latter-day Saints have ever stood for the highest resources for education, namely: the home, the church, schools, libraries, newspapers, magazines, museums, the drama, industry and government. No people have been greater builders of schools, libraries, and museums, in comparison to their conditions and environment, than the Latter-day Saints. They look to the man of science, the man of books, the man of deep religious and philosophic truths. The Latter-day Saints have always had their schools. They established a university at Nauvoo, and the same university was continued in the establishment of the University of Deseret, now the University of Utah, which was the first university established west of the Missouri river. "Mormonism" has a great love for learning. Its philosophy is that of the German Lessing: "The path by which the race reaches its perfection, every man must sooner or later travel." The dream of "Mormonism" is to make of each man and woman a reader and interpreter of life, a lover of books and a student of nature, its dream is to make for the glory of God, which is intelligence. "Mormonism" is the source of light and truth for the world today and for all time. It is the gospel of salvation, the gospel of Jesus Christ. Levi Edgar Young. One Hundred Years of Mexican Independence. In the library of the national palace in Mexico City stands the busts of Mexico's four great liberators—Hidalgo, Morelos, Juarez and Diaz. Who the fifth will be, who will rise phoenix-like from the ashes of revolution and emancipate the peons, remains to be seen. Not here, nor in all Mexico, is there a monument reared to the Conqueror Cortez. The Spaniard ground the quivering Indian under his iron-shod heel, and he was flanked by two

884 IMPROVEMENT ERA. dread allies—small-pox and the Catholic church. The former killed off more of Montezuma's subjects than all of the white men's "thunder and lightning" (cannonading), and the latter affixed itself to the throats of the inhabitants, and was only with extreme difficulty detatched from it after three hundred yer.rs. Strangely enough, it was a Catholic priest, Hidalgo, who one hundred years ago, with the bells of his parish church at Dolores sounded the death knell of Spanish rule in America. With white hair, the brow of a scholar, and the eyes of a dreamer, at nearly sixty years of age, he embarked on the high emprize of freeing the Indians. His head, preserved in a glass case in the cathedral, is the price he paid for the attempt. His, with the skulls of his four leading generals, represent fifty thousand dollars, which was the price put upon them by the opposing Spanish general. The spitted heads once occupied iron cages of the Alhondiga, the building in Guanajuato which Hidalgo had once drenched with the blue blood of Spaniards. Worldly-wise with vast reading, the old priest, with ten thousand Indians, rose in revolt against their Spanish masters. Their numbers soon swelled to eighty thousand, and this unkempt horde sacked the Spanish cities. Plunder and rapine followed in the wake of war, and when charged with cruelty and theft, Hidalgo lightly replied, "The Indians are merely taking back their own by the methods that the Spaniards taught them." Very different is the bust of Morelos, a man of the common people, who swept the revolution on to success. Bull-necked and brute-jawed, the face is redeemed by deep, flashing eyes. The upper part of the head is swathed in bandages, which he wore for incessant headache. A born soldier, he eliminated the rabble of camp-stragglers that had followed the patriot priest,and confined himself to trained troops. He ruled by personal magnetism, and could keep the starving inhabitants of a besieged city loyal to him till thev died, and one of his men went through the enemies' camp disguised as a hog to carry news to his master. He asked no quarter and he gave none. Rich Spanish land-owners offered him foity and fifty thousand dollars for their lives, but he refused them as he did the girl who came to beg for her lover's life. He wrote coolly on her petition, "Let her seek a decenter swain." Like Hidalgo,

EDITOR'S TABLE. 835 he finally gave up his life to the cause, only as a further mark of ignominy, his executioners shot him in the back. The next bust is that of Juarez, the full-blooded Zapotec Indian. Of incorruptible integrity and bull-dog tenacity, he threw off the yoke of the Catholic church. As it possessed one-third of the entire wealth of the country, he confiscated it to the government and used their own money to fight the clergy. Porferio Diaz, with guerrilla warfare, drove out the French invaders that Louis Napoleon had sent over to Mexico to establish a French monarchy. Yet Mexico is not free. Her people have not the ballot. For instance, Diaz maintained Don Luis Terrazes, the cattle king, as governor of Chihuahua. In return, Terrazes, on election day, would gather up some of his vaqueros and proceed to vote them for Diaz as president. Still, brigandage no longer flourishes as it did in times past. It is said that one coach load of people were held up and robbed three times on one journey. The first bandits they encountered merely took their money, the second relieved them of their watches and jewelry, but the third, enraged at finding them without valuables of any kind, stripped them to the skin, and made off with their clothes. The dignified old Don, garbed in a sombrero and a straw mat, climbed up beside the driver, and for eight hours the coach load made its embarrassed way, and in that condition finally drove into the courtyard of the Barranca inn. Leaving aside political controversies, the new ruler of Mexico will come into a wonderfully picturesque land, bathed in sunlight and gorgeous-hued. The people's love of color is illustrated by the story of a woman who asked her husband to bring her home a reboso (scarf) from Mexico City, where he was going to sell his vegetables. She particularly impressed upon him that she wanted it to be the color of the sky, which at sunrise when he set out was of a flaming red. He returned in the evening bringing, to her great indignation, a scarf of dusky gray, which happened to be the color of the sky when he made the purchase. An American coffee-planter says: "Superficially, Mexico is a prolonged romance. For even its brutal realities—of which there are many—are the realities of an intensely pictorial people, among surroundings that, to North-

836 IMPROVEMENT ERA era eyes, are never quite commonplace. I once saw a plucky little policeman shoot and kill an insanely drunken shoemaker, who, apropos of nothing except the fact that he was insanely drunk, had cut the throat of a young milkman. The policeman had pursued him in his mad flight for home, and just as they passed me on a deserted street near the outskirts of the town, returned a quick stab in the stomach from the shoemaker's knife, (still reeking with the milkman's blood) by a revolver shot. They then both collapsed in a mud-puddle, and to me was appointed the role of arousing the neighborhood, unbuttoning the policeman's clothes and slipping two pillows under his pale, brave head. The people who emerged from their blue and pink and yellow and green houses at my alarm, (no one in Mexico is alarmed by the sound of firearms) the distracted widow—who, however, postponed complete distraction until after she had carefully gone through her dead husband's pockets—the pompous arrival of the chief of police, the color and costuming and arrangement of it all, were far too like the last scenes of Carmen or Cavalleria Rusticana to permit of one's experiencing any but an agreeable theatrical sensation of horror." At night, when a yellow moon suffuses the palms and the orange trees in golden glow, the band plays grand opera selections to an audience composed of sugar-loaf hats, crimson scarfs, and fine eyes. The music 'crashes into the bull-fight song from Carmen, and thsre in the flaring park lamp struts the bespangled matador himself. The chorus is represented by dumpy, ill-shaped girls in pink waists with scarlet geraniums in their hair, while tall villains, in stately Spanish capes, swagger past them. The gypsy mother from Trovatore tranquilly puffs at a cigarette on a t park bench, while the pompous jefe for all the world looks like the gay Lothario of a duke from Rigoletto, who thought that the heart of womankind was both cloying and worth spoiling. There are caballeros in skin-tight velvet breeches, decorated with silver; fierce men with machetes, that one wouldn't like to meet on a lonely trail in the mountains; and a tall Hiawatha, turbaned in sky-blue and shrouded in crimson blanket and mystery. The men promenade two by two.in one direction, and the girls flock in the other;