Mexico's three civilizing, constructive processes—A typical Mexican family group—Holy Week—"La Catedral" on a "canvas" of white flowers—Reply of the Mexican government

April 3d.

Yesterday Aunt L. received a telegram necessitating her immediate presence in San G. Things are getting lively there again. I saw her off in the hurrying, crowded station with a pang, and the house seemed quite empty when I got back....

I have begun a very interesting edition of the letters of CortÉs by Archbishop Lorenzano, from the latter part of the eighteenth century. When all is said and done there have been three civilizing, constructive processes in Mexico. The Spanish conquerors, the Church, through the marvelous energies of friars and priests, and invested foreign capital.

Every visible sign of civilization comes under one of those three heads, and is not to be blinked. Each has evolved inevitably out of the elements of the previous condition. Diaz, when he formally invited foreign capital and gave guarantees, was the expression of this last very concretely. He kept pace with events, or else ran ahead. I have discovered, however, that it is permitted to be malicious, stupid, selfish, a bore, vain, vicious, dull, hard-hearted, the oppressor of the poor; but it is an unpardonable sin to be ahead of one's time. To be behind it is an unassailable patent of respectability.

It seems to me, however, that he who looks forward to a change in the affairs of the world, rather than he who looks on them as changeless, is less likely to be mistaken; and great rulers have always sensed evolutions.

April 4th,
Holy Thursday, evening.

The whole of Mexico seemed afield to-day, with a hint of Sunday best as they made the rounds of various churches for the visits to the Repository—the gente decente, as well as those sin hechos y derechos.[41]

I went through the shining Alameda, where again Indian life was beating its full around the little booths—preparing for the Resurrection morn. There is something simple and affecting about the way they regulate their commerce by these festivals of the year, this peaceful, almost rhythmic flooding in and out of the city. Now the booths are full of toy wagons, with screaming, harsh-sounding wheels, rattles of every description—in fact, any harsh combination of sounds which represents the breaking of the bones of Judas.

The Indian must have gods—and it is better to have him worshiping the image of one God, the God of gods, and His attributes, than sacrificing to Huitzilopochtli, Quetzalcoatl, and their like, in blood and terror, or wandering in the colorless and empty places of unbelief.

At San Juan de Dios I came upon a family group so charming and so artless that I could scarcely take my eyes from them. The mother, a straight-haired Indian woman, with the usual small, loose upper garment and the straight piece of cloth wrapped about her hips, had the sweetest little baby peeping out from the rebozo which bound it across her back. An old oil-can, filled with what I know not what, was by her side. The father carried a platter of dusty pink sweets, and a tribe of soft, bright-eyed, smiling children accompanied them. The next youngest to the baby was on the father's shoulder, who laid his hat before him with his platter, on the altar steps. His eyes were uplifted. All were silent and immobile, even the baby looking intently at the altar of the Repository, banked with flowers, ablaze with candle-light, and decorated with a few cages wherein were some small, bright-plumaged birds.

The church is part of an old chapel erected in the sixteenth century to Nuestra SeÑora de los Desamparados (Our Lady of the Forsaken Ones); but somehow that group fulfilling its destiny did not seem forsaken, but a part of the mysterious human fabric of which I myself was just as mysterious a bit. Before the beautiful recessed portal in the rich baroque faÇade, whose adjacent wall is ornamented in a Mauresque design, a remnant of the earliest colonial period, was a varied assortment of beggars—also not disinherited, it seemed to me—but called to partake of the sorrows of the Madre de Dios whom they so loudly invoked as I passed in.

The feature of the church is the statue of St. Anthony of Padua, which once was among the group of santos in the faÇade, but had been cast down during the anti-church riots of 1857. For many years it lay covered with mud and dust in a ditch by the Alameda. Now it is a mass of votive offerings—milagros they are called—in the shape of hearts, limbs, etc., whatever organ had been damaged by the casualties of earthly existence. I espied an ingenious presentment of a liver in copper hanging in its proper anatomical place on the person of the santo. The Indians have the strange habit of making their offerings to this shrine in groupings of thirteen—thirteen candles, bouquets containing thirteen flowers etc.—commemorative of the death of San Antonio on the 13th of June (1531).

I can't see how the Indian is benefited by the suppression of religious ceremonies. Gods he must have. And when one comes out into the Alameda, the sun shining on the belfries and domes of the many churches surrounding it, filtering through the lovely foliage of the park about which the Indian tides sweep, fixed as the laws that govern other tides, one feels the bounteousness of the natural world, and a desire to render thanks to something.

The long, narrow, flower-planted atrium of San Diego, from the early part of the sixteenth century, flanks the charming old house where the presses of the Mexican Herald turn out world news on the site of the Aztec market-place, or tinquiz. But though the outer seeming of life is changed, I could but think me of the changelessness of the human heart.

Good Friday Evening.

A sickening heat was in the air all day, with a something withering and nerve-disturbing about it, though, as the thermometer goes, the temperature was not high.

I went early to the little near-by church of Corpus Christi. The singing of "Dulce lignum" made me think of the great ceremonies at St. John Lateran, and much that is no more. I returned at 2.30, when a strange-faced priest with an "inner" look and a something burning in his voice, a Spaniard by his accent, was finishing the "Three Hours." Afterward, in company with Indians and black-rebozoed women, I followed the Stations of the Cross....

Holy Saturday.

Mexico City is one vast "rattle," the most dreadful sounds everywhere to commemorate the holy, still day, and as for Judas, he is a legion in himself.

The Calle de Tacuba presented a strange sight. Stretched on wires or strings from one house to the other were bright-colored, hideous figures, representing the maldito[42] dangling in grotesque attitudes against the blue sky. On various street corners he is being burned in effigy. Firecrackers are exploding as I write, bells are ringing from every belfry. Grief is noisy in the tropics, even for the laying in the tomb of the Son of Man.

When I came out of the cathedral I stopped at the flower-market near by. It is a modern, ugly, round, iron-roofed affair, but the flowers, the bright birds in their bamboo cages, and, above all, the dazzling air, fling a charm about it. Every modern, ugly thing in Mexico seems easily transmuted. In the old days the Indians brought their flowers straight to the Plaza in canoes by the Viga Canal.

An Indian, with what I can only call a "canvas" of white flowers, on moss and wire, about two feet square, was putting in an outline of red and purple stocks. When I asked him what he was going to represent he answered, quite simply, with a look at the church, "La catedral." A very young Indian carrying a tiny white coffin on his head passed us, as I spoke to him, and he stopped his work and made the sign of the cross.

In the arcades several "Evangelistas," scribes, were surrounded by the unlettered and unwashed—and I found some tattered children, so easily made happy, looking at stands stocked with pink, syrupy drinks and cornucopias filled with ices. But mostly the attention of the crowd was concentrated on a huge magenta and blue Judas who was going up in a blaze of infamy on the corner.

A domestic tragedy awaited me when I returned home. One of the servants, while praying before the image of Nuestra SeÑora del Sagrario in the Church of Corpus Christi, had her pocket-book removed. In it were some coral ear-rings, a lottery ticket, and the remains of her month's wages, just received.

She seemed more disturbed by the loss of the lottery ticket than the other articles, and kept saying, "QuiÉn sabe, SeÑora?" and that she had chosen the number 313, after a very precise dream of three white rabbits, one black cat (this latter the same, I fancy, that disturbs the slumbers of Calle Humboldt), followed up by the three children of her aunt, dressed in unaccustomed white. It was almost convincing. As the door of the pantry opened when supper was being served the words "Tres conejos" (three rabbits) floated into the dining-room, with an accompanying "QuiÉn sabe?"

Dia de Pascua, April 7th.

Happy Easter to my precious mother on this loveliest of Resurrection morns! San Felipe was crowded to suffocation—quite beautiful music in the rolling, gorgeous style, and everybody, even the beggars at the doors, with what they call here a cara de Pascua (Easter face). This is only a word while waiting to motor out to Tlalpan to the Del Rios' for a dia de campo.

April 10th.

To-day, luncheon here for Mlle. de TrÉville, the singer, and her mother, who are the guests of the ambassador. We all miss dear Mrs. Wilson, who has returned suddenly to the States on account of the illness of her son, Warden, at Cornell. Rieloff was among the guests and we are to dine there on Saturday and have a musical evening afterward. He was consul-general in Hong-Kong when Von Hintze was out there as lieutenant on Prince Henry's staff. Now, what the Mexicans would call their categorÍa is reversed.

April 11th.

I do hope, though probably vainly, that Madame Madero doesn't see all the dreadful caricatures appearing about her husband. El MaÑana, edited by an extremely clever Porfirista, has apparently set out to grind him to powder, and there is one, El Multicolor, edited by a Spaniard, sometimes quite ribald, which I should say is preparing to bury the remains with scant ceremony.

There was a cartoon the other day, which I am sending, representing Madero being kicked down a long, broad flight of stairs in the palace on to a transatlantic liner bearing the fateful name Ypiranga,[43] the historic ship that bore Diaz across the bitter waters. The Latin-American mind is at its best in satire, and with the dart well poisoned they kill off their public men by the dozens.

April 14th.

The Mexican government is decidedly upset to-day at the receipt of a notification from Washington to the effect that the United States will hold Mexico and the Mexican people responsible for illegal acts sacrificing or endangering American life or property. It is a simultaneous warning to both Madero and Orozco, and the bon mot of the situation here is, "Is necessity the mother of intervention?"

April 16th.

I am still numbed and dazed by the reading of the Titanic catastrophe.

April 17th.

The Mexican government replies to our notification of the 14th, first cousin to an ultimatum, in which we call categoric attention to the enormous destruction of American property, ever on the increase in Mexico, and the taking of American life, contrary to the usages of civilized nations.

The United States expects and demands that American life and property within the Republic of Mexico be justly and adequately protected, and will hold Mexico and the Mexicans responsible for all wanton and illegal acts sacrificing or endangering them.

We further insist that the rules and principles accepted by civilized nations as controlling their actions in time of war shall be observed. Any deviation from such a course, any maltreatment of any American citizen, will be deeply resented by the American government and people, and must be fully answered for by the Mexican people. The shooting of the unfortunate, misguided Thomas Fountain by Orozco (said T. F. was having a little fling seeing life, and death, too, with the Federal forces) is deplored. Orozco "answers back" that naturally he executed Fountain, who was "fighting in the enemy's army." Several Americans, employed on the Mexican railways, have also been murdered by the revolutionists.

The Mexican reply, drawn up by the long-headed, very prudent Don Pedro Lascurain, the new Minister for Foreign Affairs, says Mexico finds itself in the painful position of not recognizing the right of our government to make the various admonitions which are contained in the note, since these are not based on any incident chargeable to the Mexican government, or which could signify that it had departed from an observance of the principles and practices of international law.

The Imparcial was very fierce this morning, considering us both rough and inconsiderate, and saying that Mexico has merited better treatment at our hands.

Mostly they seem to think that we ought to take things as we find them or depart. I don't think much can be done in Latin America by threats or menaces. It is either definite force or tactful coaxing; and, anyway, the Monroe Doctrine can never be anything but a sort of wolf in sheep's clothing to the Latin-American peoples.

El PaÍs, which is the official Catholic organ, says the note is "the first flash of lightning," and, without doubt, some gorgeous storm-clouds are rolling up.

Don Porfirio is more completely vindicated than he could ever have hoped, or even wished.