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public . . . where education, like well-being, is disseminated everywhere, within reach of those who wish to obtain it. Is there anywhere else on earth where one or the other has reached such a point? France has 270,000 people who can vote, in a nation of the most ancient civilization in the world, with a population of 36,000,000 . . .
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    In Mexico, not even the loss of half its territory to the Colossus of the North lessened the faith of its Liberals in the United States. In 1864, Walt Whitman marveled that, in difficult moments for his country, it was “Mexico, the only one to whom we have ever really done wrong, and now the only one who prays for us and for our triumph, with genuine prayer. Is it not indeed strange?” There were two reasons for this continued adhesion. One was political: the Conservatives who supported the imposition of the emperor Maximilian (with the aid of French troops and Austro-Hungarian backing) favored the Confederacy and the destruction of the unified American nation. But there was also an ideological element—the United States was the mother country of the Liberals.
    After the triumph of the liberal Republic under Benito Juárez, with the French driven out and Maximilian executed, Juárez’s successors, Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada and Porfirio Díaz, had their apprehensions about the United States. The American union, buoyed by its victory in the Civil War, might decide to attack Mexico and absorb even more of its land. Lerdo de Tejada would say, during his period in office (1872–76), “Between strength and weakness, [it’s a good thing that there is] the desert,” and Díaz, during his long reign over Mexico (1876–1911), may have said: “Poor Mexico, so far from God, so near the United States.” Both launched diplomatic battles (Mexico is still renowned for the skills of its diplomats) to counter the pressures from its neighbor—commercial, military, political—and avoid any further loss of territory. But the general Mexican attitude continued to be positive and sometimes overwhelming. The Liberals had taken refuge in the United States to conspire against the dictator Santa Anna or to strengthen their resources against the French invasion. Lerdo de Tejada had gone into exile in New York after the coup d’état of Porfirio Díaz in 1876. Díaz himself had visited New York under happier circumstances in 1881, for his honeymoon. And Díaz was amenable to the “peaceful penetration” advocated by the U.S. senator James Blaine. He allowed the American-built railroad to mediate “between strength and weakness” and—taking care to balance the American presence with European participation—relied on American investment in mines, agriculture, and oil wells for much of the impressive material progress in Mexico toward the end of the nineteenth century. But the general picture changed radically with the growth of imperialist sentiments within the United States.
    Around 1897, one of José Martí’s friends, the most prominent Mexican intellectual of his time, Justo Sierra Méndez, traveled to the United States. Sierra was a jurist, an historian and journalist, an orator, and a major theorist and innovator in the field of education. In his youth he had heard Benito Juárez argue—in accord with the pure liberal canon—that Mexico could benefit considerably from protestant immigration, because Mexicans could learn habits of frugality, hard work, and the value of education. But Sierra had abandoned a strictly liberal point of view, not only to adopt the fashionable positivist and evolutionary philosophy (primarily the ideas of Auguste Comte and later Herbert Spencer) but also through distrust of American foreign policy and an incipient cultural nationalism that would carry him closer to conservative positions. (For cultural, political, and religious reasons, the Conservatives