Professional Documents
Culture Documents
ebook download (Original PDF) Hola Amigos, 3rd Edition by Ana Jarvis all chapter
ebook download (Original PDF) Hola Amigos, 3rd Edition by Ana Jarvis all chapter
by Ana Jarvis
Go to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebooksecure.com/product/original-pdf-hola-amigos-3rd-edition-by-ana-jarvis/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...
http://ebooksecure.com/product/ebook-pdf-hola-amigos-4th-edition/
https://ebooksecure.com/download/como-se-dice-student-text-ebook-
pdf/
http://ebooksecure.com/product/ebook-pdf-fundamentals-of-
taxation-2018-edition-11th-edition-by-ana-cruz/
https://ebooksecure.com/download/physical-examination-health-
assessment-ebook-pdf/
Progress in Heterocyclic Chemistry Volume 29 1st
Edition - eBook PDF
https://ebooksecure.com/download/progress-in-heterocyclic-
chemistry-ebook-pdf/
http://ebooksecure.com/product/ebook-pdf-translational-medicine-
in-cns-drug-development-volume-29/
https://ebooksecure.com/download/laboratory-manual-to-accompany-
physical-examination-health-assessment-ebook-pdf/
https://ebooksecure.com/download/cardiology-an-integrated-
approach-human-organ-systems-dec-29-2017_007179154x_mcgraw-hill-
ebook-pdf/
https://ebooksecure.com/download/netter-atlas-of-human-anatomy-
classic-regional-approach-8e-mar-29-2022_0323793738_elsevier-not-
true-pdf-ebook-pdf/
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
“May eighth. This morning I reached the Cooper’s Creek depot
and found no sign of Mr. Burke’s having visited the creek, or the
natives having disturbed the stores.”
Only a few miles away the creek ran out into channels of dry
sand where Burke, Wills and King were starving, ragged beggars fed
by the charitable black fellows on fish and a seed called nardoo, of
which they made their bread. There were nice fat rats also, delicious
baked in their skins, and the natives brought them fire-wood for the
camp.
Again they attempted to reach the Mounted Police outpost, but
the camels died, the water failed, and they starved. Burke sent Wills
back to Cooper’s Creek. “No trace,” wrote Wills in his journal, “of any
one except the blacks having been here since we left.” Brahe and
Wright had left no stores at the camp ground.
Had they only been bushmen the tracks would have told Wills of
help within his reach, the fish hooks would have won them food in
plenty. It is curious, too, that Burke died after a meal of crow and
nardoo, there being neither sugar nor fat in these foods, without
which they can not sustain a man’s life. Then King left Burke’s body,
shot three crows and brought them to Wills, who was lying dead in
camp. Three months afterward a relief party found King living among
the natives “wasted to a shadow, and hardly to be distinguished as a
civilized being but by the remnants of the clothes upon him.”
“They should not have gone,” said one pioneer of these lost
explorers. “They weren’t bushmen.” Afterward a Mr. Collis and his
wife lived four years in plenty upon the game and fish at the
Innaminka water-hole where poor Burke died of hunger.
Such were the first crossings from east to west, and from south
to north of the Australian continent.
XVIII
A. D. 1867
THE HERO-STATESMAN
THERE is no greater man now living in the world than Diaz the
hero-statesman, father of Mexico. What other soldier has scored
fourteen sieges and fifty victorious battles? What other statesman,
having fought his way to the throne, has built a civilized nation out of
chaos?
This Spanish-red Indian half-breed began work at the age of
seven as errand boy in a shop. At fourteen he was earning his living
as a private tutor while he worked through college for the priesthood.
At seventeen he was a soldier in the local militia and saw his country
overthrown by the United States, which seized three-fourths of all
her territories. At the age of twenty-one, Professor Diaz, in the chair
of Roman law at Oaxaca, was working double tides as a lawyer’s
clerk.
In the Mexican “republic” it is a very serious offense to vote for
the Party-out-of-office, and the only way to support the opposition is
to get out with a rifle and fight. So when Professor Diaz voted at the
next general election he had to fly for his life. After several months of
hard fighting he emerged from his first revolution as mayor of a
village.
The villagers were naked Indians, and found their new mayor an
unexpected terror. He drilled them into soldiers, marched them to his
native city Oaxaca, captured the place by assault, drove out a local
usurper who was making things too hot for the citizens, and then
amid the wild rejoicings that followed, was promoted to a captaincy
in the national guards.
Captain Diaz explained to his national guards that they were fine
men, but needed a little tactical exercise. So he took them out for a
gentle course of maneuvers, to try their teeth on a rebellion which
happened to be camped conveniently in the neighborhood. When he
had finished exercising his men, there was no rebellion left, so he
marched them home. He had to come home because he was
dangerously wounded.
It must be explained that there were two big political parties, the
clericals, and the liberals—both pledged to steal everything in sight.
Diaz was scarcely healed of his wound, when a clerical excursion
came down to steal the city. He thrashed them sick, he chased them
until they dropped, and thrashed them again until they scattered in
helpless panic.
The liberal president rewarded Colonel Diaz with a post of such
eminent danger, that he had to fight for his life through two whole
years before he could get a vacation. Then Oaxaca, to procure him a
holiday, sent up the young soldier as member of parliament to the
capital.
Of course the clerical army objected strongly to the debates of a
liberal congress sitting in parliament at the capital. They came and
spoiled the session by laying siege to the City of Mexico. Then the
member for Oaxaca was deputed to arrange with these clericals.
He left his seat in the house, gathered his forces, and chased
that clerical army for two months. At last, dead weary, the clericals
had camped for supper, when Diaz romped in and thrashed them.
He got that supper.
So disgusted were the clerical leaders that they now invited
Napoleon III to send an army of invasion. Undismayed, the
unfortunate liberals fought a joint army of French and clericals,
checked them under the snows of Mount Orizaba, and so routed
them before the walls of Puebla that it was nine months before they
felt well enough to renew the attack. The day of that victory is
celebrated by the Mexicans as their great national festival.
In time, the French, forty thousand strong, not to mention their
clerical allies, returned to the assault of Puebla, and in front of the
city found Diaz commanding an outpost. The place was only a large
rest-house for pack-trains, and when the outer gate was carried, the
French charged in with a rush. One man remained to defend the
courtyard, Colonel Diaz, with a field-piece, firing shrapnel, mowing
away the French in swathes until his people rallied from their panic,
charged across the square, and recovered the lost gates.
The city held out for sixty days, but succumbed to famine, and
the French could not persuade such a man as Diaz to give them any
parole. They locked him up in a tower, and his dungeon had but a
little iron-barred window far up in the walls. Diaz got through those
bars, escaped, rallied a handful of Mexicans, armed them by
capturing a French convoy camp, raised the southern states of
Mexico, and for two years held his own against the armies of France.
President Juarez had been driven away into the northern desert,
a fugitive, the Emperor Maximilian reigned in the capital, and
Marshal Bazaine commanded the French forces that tried to conquer
Diaz in the south. The Mexican hero had three thousand men and a
chain of forts. Behind that chain of forts he was busy reorganizing
the government of the southern states, and among other details,
founding a school for girls in his native city.
Marshal Bazaine, the traitor, who afterward sold France to the
Germans, attempted to bribe Diaz, but, failing in that, brought nearly
fifty thousand men to attack three thousand. Slowly he drove the
unfortunate nationalists to Oaxaca and there Diaz made one of the
most glorious defenses in the annals of war. He melted the cathedral
bells for cannon-balls, he mounted a gun in the empty belfry, where
he and his starving followers fought their last great fight, until he
stood alone among the dead, firing charge after charge into the
siege lines.
Once more he was cast into prison, only to make such frantic
attempts at escape that in the end he succeeded in scaling an
impossible wall. He was an outlaw now, living by robbery, hunted like
a wolf, and yet on the second day after that escape, he commanded
a gang of bandits and captured a French garrison. He ambuscaded
an expedition sent against him, raised an army, and reconquered
Southern Mexico.
Porfirio Diaz
It was then (1867) that the United States compelled the French
to retire. President Juarez marched from the northern deserts,
gathering the people as he came, besieged Querétaro, captured and
shot the Emperor Maximilian. Diaz marched from the south, entered
the City of Mexico, handed over the capital to his triumphant
president, resigned his commission as commander-in-chief, and
retired in deep contentment to manufacture sugar in Oaxaca.
For nine years the hero made sugar. Over an area in the north
as large as France, the Apache Indians butchered every man,
woman and child with fiendish tortures. The whole distracted nation
cried in its agony for a leader, but every respectable man who tried
to help was promptly denounced by the government, stripped of his
possessions and driven into exile. At last General Diaz could bear it
no longer, made a few remarks and was prosecuted. He fled, and
there began a period of the wildest adventures conceivable, while
the government attempted to hunt him down. He raised an
insurrection in the north, but after a series of extraordinary victories,
found the southward march impossible. When next he entered the
republic of Mexico, he came disguised as a laborer by sea to the port
of Tampico.
At Vera Cruz he landed, and after a series of almost miraculous
escapes from capture, succeeded in walking to Oaxaca. There he
raised his last rebellion, and with four thousand followers
ambuscaded a government army, taking three thousand prisoners,
the guns and all the transport. President Lerdo heard the news, and
bolted with all the cash. General Diaz took the City of Mexico and
declared himself president of the republic.
Whether as bandit or king, Diaz has always been the
handsomest man in Mexico, the most courteous, the most charming,
and terrific as lightning when in action. The country suffered from a
very plague of politicians until one day he dropped in as a visitor,
quite unexpected, at Vera Cruz, selected the eleven leading
politicians without the slightest bias as to their views, put them up
against the city wall and shot them. Politics was abated.
The leading industry of the country was highway robbery, until
the president, exquisitely sympathetic, invited all the principal
robbers to consult with him as to details of government. He formed
them into a body of mounted police, which swept like a whirlwind
through the republic and put a sudden end to brigandage. Capital
punishment not being permitted by the humane government, the
robbers were all shot for “attempting to escape.”
Next in importance was the mining of silver, and the recent
decline in its value threatened to ruin Mexico. By the magic of his
finance, Diaz used that crushing reverse to lace the country with
railroads, equip the cities with electric lights and traction power far in
advance of any appliances we have in England, open great
seaports, and litter all the states of Mexico with prosperous factories.
Meanwhile he paid off the national debt, and made his coinage
sound.
He never managed himself to speak any other language than his
own majestic, slow Castilian, but he knew that English is to be the
tongue of mankind. Every child in Mexico had to go to school to learn
English.
And this greatest of modern sovereigns went about among his
people the simplest, most accessible of men. “They may kill me if
they want to,” he said once, “but they don’t want to. They rather like
me.” So one might see him taking his morning ride, wearing the
beautiful leather dress of the Mexican horsemen, or later in the day,
in a tweed suit going down to the office by tram car, or on his
holidays hunting the nine-foot cats which we call cougar, or of a
Sunday going to church with his wife and children. On duty he was
an absolute monarch, off duty a kindly citizen, and it seemed to all of
us who knew the country that he would die as he had lived, still in
harness. One did not expect too much—the so-called elections were
a pleasant farce, but the country was a deal better governed than the
western half of the United States. Any fellow entitled to a linen collar
in Europe wore a revolver in Mexico, as part of the dress of a
gentleman, but in the wildest districts I never carried a cartridge.
Diaz had made his country a land of peace and order, strong,
respected, prosperous, with every outward sign of coming greatness.
Excepting only Napoleon and the late Japanese emperor, he was
both in war and peace the greatest leader our world has ever known.
But the people proved unworthy of their chief; to-day he is a broken
exile, and Mexico has lapsed back into anarchy.
XIX
A. D. 1870
THE SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT