Given the importance of rural unrest in the destabilizing of Porfirian Mexico, it seems at least ironic to find these words attributed to Díaz during his Tuxtepec revolt. And, given the attention paid to the repressive elements of the Díaz dictatorship, one might easily argue that Díaz never intended to fulfill that promise, vague though it may be. A number of works seem to blame Díaz personally for the land problem which lead to his overthrow. Others maintain that Díaz remained aloof and was isolated from the common people; but by far the greatest number of works employ such amorphous or monolithic concepts as the “State,” the “Díaz regime,” “porjirismo,” or simply “the government” and focus exclusively on evidence of repression in Porfirian Mexico. Repression has attracted attention in part because it has been important in explaining dissatisfaction which lead to the Revolution of 1910 and in part because violence attracted a great deal of attention from contemporaries. This interest provides historians with more accessible sources while evidence of a more conciliatory attitude has remained hidden in the collection of Porfirio Díaz's presidential papers.

L'Idée, quand elle s'est
completement incorporée à l'être
moral, devient aussi impulsive
que le sentiment, se transforme
on peut dire en sentiment.
— D. Bellegarde.

Louis-Dantès Bellegarde, (1877-1966), is acknowledged generally to have been the most significant and influential diplomat produced by the Republic of Haiti in this century. His first diplomatic assignment came fortuitously at age forty-four, when President Philippe-Sudre Dartiguenave appointed him on an impulse to the Paris legation, the Holy See, and to the League of Nations in 1921. In that period, he also served as a member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration (The Hague), and was the Honorary President of the Second Pan-African Congress held under the aegis of W. E. B. DuBois. Previously, from age twenty-seven, he had occupied high governmental positions at the sub-cabinet and then cabinet level, primarily in the fields of education and agriculture. His formal training had been in law, banking, and commerce. That particular training was to serve him well, but color his perspective. The League's Council named him to the Commission of Slavery and Forced Labour in 1924. In 1927, he was a special guest at the Fourth Pan-African Congress held in New York. Later, in 1930, President Louis-Eugène Roy appointed him anew to France and the League of Nations where again he created a sensation.

Gold and silver production in Honduras probably never exceeded 5% of that produced in Spanish America at any one time during the colonial period, but it was of considerable importance to the local economy and employed a significant proportion of the total workforce. In Spanish America as a whole the types of labour that were employed in mining were extremely varied. During the early Conquest period Indian slaves were used to pan gold in the Antilles, and later Mexican silver mining relied on the employment of free labour supplemented by that of Indian and Negro slaves. In Colombia the repartimiento provided Indians for mining up to 1729, by which time the Indian population and gold production had declined, but in Peru the mita continued to supply labour for the mines until its abolition in 1812, although by that time the mines had become heavily dependent on free labour. The dominant type of labour employed in mining in any one area at any one time appears to have been strongly influenced by the availability of Indian labour, which was largely determined by the size of the Indian population and the number of competing demands for labour, and by the profitability of mining, which determined the ability of miners to overcome shortages of labour. These influences were very apparent in the mining industry in Honduras, where during the colonial period many different types of labour were employed: Indian slaves, Indians working in the service of encomenderos, Negro slaves, Spanish immigrant workers, Indians working under the repartimiento and free labourers.

For many years, the sudden collapse of the major religious orders in Peru shortly after independence has interested this author. For the religious orders, Lima had been what it was for the viceroy: the center of the organizational structure for most of the continent with the stately conventos and lavishly endowed churches to attest to the importance of that position. Yet, within a relatively short period, 1826-1830, the grandeur faded and the power disappeared. Why?