Diaz (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Diaz The author of this volume has here combined an appreciation of a man remarkable in his generation with a lively picture of an American republic, still little known to us in Europe; thus fulfilling two objects of this series. President Diaz's achievements as a statesman, though important to his contemporaries, appear to have had only a passing value. But he is worthy of note by the student of the nineteenth century, since he brought his country to a more respectable prominence and to greater prosperity than it had enjoyed since its original conquest by the Spaniards; and he also induced many outside its borders to take an interest, however mercenary and uninformed it may have been, in the country he governed so absolutely and for so long a period. For his own corner of the world, indeed, he was truly a maker of the nineteenth century. He is also interesting as a type, a particularly favourable type, of the condottieri who flourish and then vanish so rapidly on the Central and South American scene. Mexico itself, though so near a neighbour to the United States, is still the most mysterious to us of all the American countries. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.