GUSTAVO MADERO

armed and unattended; I see him on the International Bridge, hand-clasped with another ruler, promoting peace; I see him with his beloved family in his home of sadness, preparing to bid farewell forever to the scenes of his triumphs; I see him in his last flight from the country to which he gave a new birth of freedom; I see him as an exile in a country across the seas; I see him there, dying of a broken heart, as his fellow-countrymen are being sacrificed to gratify the ambitions of unworthy would-be successors; I see Diaz, as the Napoleon of Mexico, in history, growing greater and grander through the centuries,

Let no man impugn the motive of the rebel. The rebel is the friend of the oppressed, the foe of the oppressor. The rebel is the protector of the timid, the terror of the tyrant. The rebel is the defender of the people, the destroyer of the despot. The rebel is the champion of freedom; freedom, the child of rebellion. To the patriotism of the rebel must be accorded the credit of our free republics in America. The rebel of today is the patriot of tomorrow.

To the discredit of America is that damning page of recorded history, that of the death of the North American Indian; to the credit of "Old Mexico," the Indian of that country still lives, still has the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I am not of those who think the only good Indian is the "dead Indian." For many years I have been the champion of the native Indian, crossing the continent four times to plead for his education before the Commissioner of Indian Affairs and the committees of the two houses of Congress. The Indian is human and has his faults, but he will not sell his freedom for gold.

His lands may be laid waste; he may be driven from fertile fields to barren deserts; the scalps of his wife and the children he loves may dangle at the belt of his conquerors, but he will not be enslaved. All that is near and dear to him may be sacrificed on the altar of the greed of others, but his liberty is his life. Long before the Emancipation Proclamation of Abraham Lincoln, Mexico had ceased to be "half slave and half free." For the millions of Indians and mixed-bloods of Mexico that are fighting for what they think is justice and freedom I have the highest regard. Their self-sacrifices on the bloody battlefields of the past four years presage a future for the Mexican Republic, as does no other trait in human character. Whatever may be said now of the leaders and their followers, they are Mexicans, men as brave as ever stood in the forefront of battle. In other years the historian will tell of their valorous deeds in prose, and the poet will sing of those deeds in song. As Lincoln resolved for the soldier-dead at Gettysburg, let us here highly resolve for the Mexican dead,-" that these dead shall not have died in vain, and that the government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth."

In Mexico twelve millions of illiterates; in the United States and her territorial possessions, fourteen millions! With so great illiteracy, in each republic there is a cloud somewhat larger than a man's hand which o'erhangs awfully threatening. In each republic the image whose head may be of fine gold has arms of silver, thighs of brass, legs of iron, and feet part of iron and part of clay. Ignorance is a basilisk which by its poisonous breath blights all

the intellectual verdure through which it creeps; ignorance is a Lake Avernon whose mephitic vapors impregnate with poison all the life that flits in its atmosphere, bathes in its waters, or loiters on its shores; ignorance is a cancerous ulcer that destroys the tissues and saps the life of the body politic.

An old Roman author said: "While we live let us live"; one of the greatest Generals of modern times said: "Let us have peace"; the highest sentiment in mankind, that of Frederick Froebel: "Let us live in our children." "The fate of empires depends upon the education of youth, ," said Aristotle; "Public instruction should be the first object of government," said Napoleon; said Burke: "Education is the chief defense of nations." "Educate, educate, we must educate or die by our prosperity." "Educate the people," was the cry of Penn, and Washington, and Jefferson, and Garfield, to a free people. Egypt raised aloft her cities, her temples, and her pyramids. Phoenicia built her ships and carried on commerce over the Mediterranean, and farther out on the broad Atlantic. She did more; she invented letters and introduced the alphabetical system into Greece, thence into Rome. In Greece and Rome and Alexandria they had their painters, their sculptors and their architects, their authors and their statesmen, all of whom came from the nobility; but in none of these had they any national system of free education for God's poor. Free education is the poor man's marble staircase that leads upward and into the palaces of wealth, health and happiness.