distrust, those born in Mexico who might be
suspected of particular affection for the country
of their birth. The Spaniards born in Spain
were separated from all others, as a ruling caste.
This involved often the establishment of a division
of caste between a father and his children,
and cut off from children the hope of following
in the steps of their fathers as servants of the
state. The Creoles, taught by the priests, and
not suffered so much as to see a book in which
the existence of such a thing as political liberty
was mentioned, could earn money by mining or
domestic trade (the foreign trade was restricted
by incredible absurdities of protective discipline),
and they could buy with their money titles or
commissions in the militia, a favourite extravagance
that turned every thriving shopkeeper
into a captain or colonel, who might even be
seen placidly weighing out sugar in full
regimentals. The only thing that the Spanish
government could not discover how to do for the
protection of the native Mexicans, was to root
out the banana, which, it was argued, by securing
food to the poor, made them lazy. As it would
have required a large and very costly army
of officials to secure this extirpation of food,
it was proposed and desired but not accom-
plished.

But let the Spanish despotism do what it
would, these people could not be kept to the
last from hearing of the existence in the world
of other desirable things than the company of
priests and women, with money, titles, and fine
clothes. The independence of our North
American colonies, and the power and honour
that came of it, could not be kept a secret.
Forbidden books were brought in over the land
frontier. News of the French revolution and
the emotions that belonged to it could not be
kept out of Mexico. Agitation was the
consequence, and Spain justified increase of the
commotion by the way she took for its repression.
The Spanish authorities saw revolt in
every effort after better knowledge, of whatever
sort, and prohibited the establishment of printing
offices in towns of from forty to fifty thousand
inhabitants.

The growth of an indolent clergy had been so
rapid, that before the middle of the seventeenth
century, Philip the Fourth was prayed by the
municipality of Mexico to check the indefinite
increase in the number of monks and nuns, to
limit the amount of property held by convents,
and prevent them from acquiring more; for
already they had possession of the greater part
of the territorial domains, acquired by gifts or
purchase. Let there be no more bishops sent
from Spain, or ordained in Mexico. Already
there were in the country six thousand priests
who had nothing to do. And let there be fewer
church holidays, promoting—rather more surely
than the bananas—idleness among the people.
When the Spanish yoke was about to be thrown
off, ten thousand monks and nuns held property,
real and personal, equal to half the value of
all the real property of the country. There
was also a heavy annual levy of tithes. The
wealth was divided most unequally among its
holders. An archbishop or bishop took be-
tween twenty and thirty thousand pounds a
year. A priest of an Indian village, doing the
real missionary work for which the church was
founded, might get between twenty and thirty
pounds a year. The great prizes were, with the
rarest exception, all given to priests born in
Spain; the parish priests on small pay were
Mexican- born Spaniards, Creoles, and often
Indians. For this reason the inferior clergy
has been throughout the later history of Mexico
on the side of the patriots, while the high
dignitaries have upheld—reckless of Mexican
interests and caring only for their own—the old
disorder of things. All priests, as well as the
military class, had "fueros" or extraordinary
privileges which exempted them from judgment,
even upon questions of debtor and creditor,
before courts whose members were not of their
own body. In course of time, the civil power
had acquired a right of hearing criminal charges
against priests, after their ecclesiastical
superiors had degraded them and given them up
to the secular arm; but in no case could the law
proceed to judgment so effective that a bishop
might not neutralise its action.

So matters stood with the Mexicans when, in
the year eighteen hundred and eight, they heard
that Napoleon was become master of Spain.
First came, under the lead of the pure Spanish
chiefs, an outburst of sympathy with the
misfortunes of the outcast Bourbon. But the
Mexican-born population, that had been ruled
by the sole will of the sovereign, when that
sovereign abdicated were without a master, and
they seized then on the idea of a national
sovereignty. In the capital city of Mexico the new
ideas associated with this term in the states of
America, and part of Europe, were become
familiar, and the Ayuntamiento, or local council of
Mexico, went in state to the viceroy, professing
attachment to the House of Bourbon, but, in
the name of New Spain, asking for the convocation
of a National Assembly. The viceroy
referred the question to his imperial council, the
Audiencia of Mexico, and this body, composed
exclusively of natives of Spain—its members
being even, as a condition of their membership,
forbidden to marry in Mexico—strongly resisted.
But the Ayuntamiento held to its request, and
the viceroy, Iturrigaray, resolved to comply
with it. Whereupon he was one night seized
in his bed by three hundred of the pure Spanish
party, and confined with his two sons in the
prisons of the Inquisition; his wife and his
other children being imprisoned in a convent.
An obscure soldier, who happened to be the
senior among the Spanish officers, was placed in
the viceroyalty, but he proved so blunt a tool that
in a few months he was removed, and the
Archbishop of Mexico put in his place. The
archbishop, in turn, gave way to the rule of the
Audiencia itself, until the arrival of a new viceroy from
Spain. Meanwhile, this body of Spanish-bom
rulers was banishing and imprisoning influential
Mexicans, exhorting Spaniards to organise