CHAPTER XXV.

MEXICO.

In company with a throng of men of all races, all tongues, and all trades, such as a Californian steamer can alone collect, I came coasting southward under the cliffs of Lower California. Of the thousand passengers who sought refuge from the stifling heat upon the upper and hurricane decks, more than half were diggers returning with a “pile” to their homes in the Atlantic States. While we hung over the bulwarks watching the bonitos and the whales, the diggers threw “bolas” at the boobies that flew out to us from the blazing rocks, and brought them down screaming upon the decks. Threading our way through the reefs off the lovely Island of Margarita, where the “Independence” was lost with three hundred human beings, we lay-to at Cape St. Lucas, and landed his Excellency Don Antonio Pedrin, Mexican Governor of Lower California, and a Juarez man, in the very bay where Cavendish lay in wait for months for the “great Manilla ship”--the Acapulco galleon.

When Girolamo Benzoni visited the Mexican Pacific coast, he confused the turtle with the “crocodile,” describing the former under the latter‘s name; but at Manzanilla, the two may be seen lying almost side by side upon the sands. Separated from the blue waters of the harbor by a narrow strand there is a festering lagoon, the banks of which swarm with the smaller alligators; but a few yards off, upon the other slope, the townsfolk and the turtles they had brought down for sale to our ship‘s purser were lying, when I saw them, in a confused heap under an awning of sailcloth nailed up to the palm-trees. Alligator, turtle, Mexican, it was hard to say which was the superior being. A French corvette was in possession of the port--one of the last of the holding-places through which the remnants of the army of occupation were dribbling back to France.

In the land-locked bay of Acapulco, one of the dozen “hottest places in the world,” we found two French frigates, whose officers boarded us at once. They told us that they landed their marines every morning after breakfast, and re-embarked them before sunset; they could get nothing from the shore but water; the Mexicans, under Alvarez, occupied the town at night, and carried off even the fruit. When I asked about supplies, the answer was sweeping: “Ah, mon Dieu, monsieur, cette _ssacrrréeee_ canaille de Alvarez nous vole tout. Nous n‘avons que de l‘eau fraîche, et Alvarez va nous emporter la fontaine aussi quelque nuit. Ce sont des voleurs, voyez-vous, ces Méchicanos.” When they granted us leave to land, it was with the proviso that we should not blame them if we were shot at by the Mexicans as we went ashore, and by themselves as we came off again. Firing often takes place at night between Alvarez and the French, but with a total loss in many months of only two men killed.

The day of my visit to Acapulco was the anniversary of the issue, one year before, of Marshal Bazaine‘s famous order of the day, directing the instant execution, as red-handed rebels, of Mexican prisoners taken by the French. It is a strange commentary upon the Marshal‘s circular that in a year from its issue the “Latin empire in America” should have had a term set to it by the President of the United States. In Canada, in India, in Egypt, in New Zealand, the English have met the French abroad, and in this Mexican affair history does but repeat itself. There is nothing more singular to the Londoner than the contempt of the Americans for France. All Europe seems small when seen from the United States; but the opinion of Great Britain and the strength of Russia are still looked on with some respect: France alone completely vanishes, and instead of every one asking, as with us, “What does the Emperor say?” no one cares in the least what Napoleon does or thinks. In a Chicago paper I have seen a column of Washington news headed, “Seward orders _Lewis_ Napoleon to leave Mexico right away! Nap. lies badly to get out of the fix!” While the Americans are still, in a high degree, susceptible of affront from England, and would never, if they conceived themselves purposely insulted, stop to weigh the cost of war, toward France they only feel, as a Californian said to me, “Is it worth our while to set to work to whip her?” The effect of Gettysburg and Sadowa will be that, except Great Britain, Italy, and Spain, no nations will care much for the threats or praises of Imperial France.

The true character of the struggle in Mexico has not been pointed out. It was not a mere conflict between the majority of the people and a minority supported by foreign aid, but an uprising of the Indians of the country against the whites of the chief town. The Spaniards of the capital were Maximilian‘s supporters, and upon them the Indians and Mestizos have visited their revenge for the deeds of Cortez and Pizarro. On the west coast there is to be seen no trace of Spanish blood: in dress, in language, in religion the people are Iberian; in features, in idleness, and in ferocity, undoubtedly Red Indian.

In the reports of the Argentine Confederation it is stated that the Caucasian blood comes to the front in the mixed race; a few hundred Spanish families in La Plata are said to have absorbed several hundred thousand Indians, without suffering in their whiteness or other national characteristics. There is something of the frog that swallowed the ox in this; and the theories of the Argentine officials, themselves of the mixed race, cannot outweigh the evidence of our own eyes in the seaport towns of Mexico. There at least it is the Spaniards, not the Indians, who have disappeared; and the only mixture of blood that can be traced is that of Red Indian and negro in the fisher boys about the ports. They are lithe lads, with eyes full of art and fire.

The Spaniards of Mexico have become Red Indians, as the Turks of Europe have become Albanians or Circassians. Where the conquering marries into the conquered race it ends by being absorbed, and the mixed breed gradually becomes pure again in the type of the more numerous race. It would seem that the North American continent will soon be divided between the Saxon and the Aztec republics.

In California I once met with a caricature in which Uncle Sam or Brother Jonathan is lying on his back upon Canada and the United States, with his head in Russian America, and his feet against a tumble-down fence, behind which is Mexico. His knees are bent, and his position cramped. He says, “Guess I shall soon have to stretch my legs _some!_” There is not in the United States any strong feeling in favor of the annexation of the remainder of the continent, but there is a solemn determination that no foreign country shall in any way gain fresh footing or influence upon American soil, and that monarchy shall not be established in Mexico or Canada. Further than this, there is a belief that, as the south central portions of the States become fully peopled up, population will pour over into the Mexican provinces of Chihuahua and Sonora, and that the annexation of these and some other portions of Mexico to the United States cannot long be prevented. For such acquisitions of territory America would pay as she paid in the case of Texas, which she first conquered, and then bought at a fair price.

In annexing the whole of Mexico, Protestant Americans would feel that they were losing more than they could gain. In California and New Mexico, they have already to deal with a population of Mexican Catholics, and difficulties have arisen in the matter of the church lands. The Catholic vote is powerful not only in California and New York, but in Maryland, in Louisiana, in Kansas, and even in Massachusetts. The sons of the Pilgrim Fathers would scarcely look with pleasure on the admission to the Union of ten millions of Mexican Catholics, and, on the other hand, the day-dreams of Leonard Calvert would not be realized in the triumph of such a Catholicism as theirs any more than in the success of that of the Philadelphia Academy, or New York Tammany Hall.

With the exception of the Irish, the great majority of Catholic emigrants avoid the United States, but the migration of European Catholics to South America is increasing year by year. Just as the Germans, the Norwegians, and the Irish flow toward the States, the French, the Spanish, and the Italians flock into La Plata, Chili, and Brazil. The European population of La Plata has already reached three hundred thousand, and is growing fast. The French “mission” in Mexico was the making of that great country a further field for the Latin immigration; and when the Californians marched to Juarez‘s help, it was to save Mexico to North America.

In all history, nothing can be found more dignified than the action of America upon the Monroe doctrine. Since the principle was first laid down in words, in 1823, the national behavior has been courteous, consistent, firm; and the language used now that America is all-powerful, is the same that her statesmen made use of during the rebellion in the hour of her most instant peril. It will be hard for political philosophers of the future to assert that a democratic republic can have no foreign policy.

The Pacific coast of Mexico is wonderfully full of beauties of a peculiar kind; the sea is always calm, and of a deep dull blue, with turtles lying basking on the surface, and flying-fish skimming lightly over its expanse, while the shores supply a fringe of bright yellow sand at once to the ocean blue and to the rich green of the cactus groves. On every spit or sand-bar there grows the feathery palm. A low range of jungle-covered hills is cut by gullies, through which we get glimpses of lagoons bluer than the sea itself, and behind them the sharp volcanic peaks rise through and into cloud. Once in awhile, Colima, or other giant hill, towering above the rest in blue-black gloom, serves to show that the shores belong to some mightier continent than Calypso‘s isle.