Chapter 59

The Priests gainers by the Independence.--Improved Condition of the Peons.--Mexican Mechanics.--The Oppression they suffer.--Low state of the Mechanic Arts.--The Story of the Portress.--Charity of the Poor.--The Whites not superior to Meztizos.---License and Woman's Rights at Mexico.--The probable Future of Mexico.--Mormonism impending over Mexico.--Mormonism and Mohammedanism.

The clergy and the other white fomenters of the separation from Spain never contemplated the formation of a republic, or the arming of the _leperos_. They were alarmed at the bold reforms of the liberal Cortes of Spain, and trembled at the prospect of losing their privileges and monopolies. They judged that the safest course for them was the establishment of an empire upon the subversion of the vice-kingdom, which would be so weak a power that they could overawe it. The priests reasoned correctly, and have augmented their privileges and their wealth, as we shall presently see. The Spanish monopolists were ruined by the Revolution, as we have seen in the last chapter. But the common people were the gainers ultimately by the expulsion of the Spaniards, though the whole country suffered for a time by the withdrawal of the capital of the Spaniards. The benefit derived by the _peons_ from this revolution was the political importance which it gave them. The Parian and the _lepero_ perished together. The latter ceased to exist when the last stone of the former disappeared. The Spaniards had been banished from the country long before the authorities undertook the removal of this obnoxious edifice, and those who wished to avoid a like fate sought security in acts of benevolence; so that at Mexico charitable institutions are now so well conducted, that it is one of the few Catholic cities in the world that can boast of being free entirely from beggars. Political power gave to the common people an importance in the social scale which they had never before enjoyed. With the cheapness of clothing the unclad multitude have disappeared, and the new generation find more employment and better wages than their ancestors did, when all branches of industry were clogged with monopolies, and they are, consequently, more industrious and temperate.

MEXICAN MECHANICS.

Still, the Mexican _peon_ is immensely below the American laborer, and still has to be watched as a thief, for the want of a little morality intermixed with his religious instruction. It is a degrading sight to stand at the door of one of the large coach manufactories at Mexico, and to witness the manner in which they search them, one by one, as they come out. The natives, who have learned the most difficult parts of coach-building from English and French employers, can not for a moment be trusted, lest they should steal their tools or the materials upon which they are employed. I saw even the man who was placing the gorgeous trimmings on the Nuncio's coach carefully searched, lest he should have concealed about his person a scrap of the valuable material. That they are thieves is not to be wondered at when their catechism teaches them "that a theft that does not exceed a certain amount is not a grave offense."[55]

LOW STATE OF MECHANIC ARTS.

With us, a mechanic is associated with the idea of a person occupying a respectable position in life; but at Mexico he still belongs to a degraded class, as men are there esteemed; he is a _peon_, on a footing with a common laborer. The highest wages are three shillings a day, while at least two days in the week he is kept from his usual employment by "days of obligation," that is, festival days on which it is unlawful to work. _Tortillas_, Indian griddle-cakes, with black beans (_frijoles_) and red peppers (_chilie_), are his daily food; and his lodgings are a palm-leaf mat upon a stone or earthen floor, while his _serapa_ does duty for a blanket at night. The greasy friar does not forget him as he goes his rounds in search of Peter's pence; and the priest sets before him the horrid consequences of entering Purgatory without first discharging the debt he still owes for his baptism. He and his "wife" still remain unmarried; for how can they ever raise the money to pay the priest? And if by chance he gets involved in debt, or for the debt of one of his kindred, one third part of his daily labor is embargoed by the creditor.

When the Mexican mechanic has a small kit of uncouth tools, he works upon his own account, but at the smallest possible profit. When he has finished a pair of shoes, if he be a shoemaker, he or his wife starts out to dispose of them to some passer-by in the street before a new pair is undertaken. When the tinman has finished a sprinkling pot, he or his boy walks the street till it is sold, and then perhaps a tin bath is made; and if, luckily, from a chance customer he has obtained an extra price, a _fiesta_ is proclaimed to the family connection, and maybe the additional luxury of buying a ticket in the lottery of the Virgin of Guadalupe is indulged in, and a vow is made that if he wins a prize, one half of the profits of the stake shall be deposited as a gift at her shrine. In this way a week is passed, and it is terminated with the entire exhaustion of the little fortune of the poor mechanic. The kindred have had a time; _pulque_ and liquor have been passed around freely; the women have enjoyed "equal rights" with the men; they have drunk their full share, and smoked their little cigars. The tin-man, once more penniless, with an aching head, but with a light heart, returns to his little hammer, and a piece of solder and tin got on the pledge of his future earnings. Such is the condition of native Mexican mechanics, and of the mechanic arts at the capital.

The complicated machinery by which our shoes are made, or the equally complicated machinery by which tin is worked up into culinary vessels, never entered into the dreams of a Mexican mechanic. No Mexican man of science ever thought of degrading himself so low as to undertake the improvement of the mechanic arts; yet it is astonishing to see what Mexican mechanics do accomplish with their imperfect means. I have often stopped to witness the success of a poor old man building a piano, which was both skillfully arranged and well-toned, and yet the tools employed were apparently inadequate for such a purpose. In the same primitive style were coaches built before foreigners came and substituted coaches of modern pattern instead of the old, egg-formed coach-bodies of the vice-kingdom.

It may seem like trifling to be dwelling thus upon the character of the substratum of Mexican society, but it is from this very substratum that the wealth or poverty of a nation is to be traced. The sense of the dignity of labor is the foundation of American prosperity, while the degradation of the mechanics and laboring class of Mexicans is the cause of the national imbecility.

THE STORY OF THE PORTRESS.

Let us look at the common people of Mexico from another point of view. I will reproduce in substance the tale of the old Meztizo woman, who opens and shuts the great street door to all well-known inmates, by day and by night, and to such others as can give satisfactory answers. She is esteemed a lucky woman because she has the use of a small room on the ground floor for her services, where she and a number of her relatives are often hived together. Her story is very likely not true in every particular, for it can not be denied that she, like all of her class, does not consider falsehood _per se_ as any other than a venial sin. How should she, considering the teaching she receives?[56] But the story is nevertheless, in the main, a pretty fair picture of the life of the humbler classes in republican Mexico.

She will tell you how her husband basely left her with a family of children, and took to another woman, because they were not able to pay the priest to get legally married. Her eldest son was seized and taken to the wars, where he was compelled to stand up to shoot and be shot at, to settle the question which of two sets of white men should enjoy the right of plundering the people. Whether he should hereafter be discharged honorably, or run away, or be killed in battle, it was the same to her, for the man that recruited the soldiers would know that he had once been a soldier, and would be sure to seize him first when ordered to furnish recruits; and, let what will be the course of political events, he is certainly lost to her forever.

Her eldest daughter had been a help to her. She ground corn for the _tortillas_, and could guard the house door while the old woman went to the public wash-house to wash a few shirts which gentlemen had occasionally intrusted to her care. But a chance shot in one of the street battles had hit her, and she too was gone. Her second son had stopped too long in front of the _pulque_-shop after his day's work was finished, and was involved in a street affray, in which knives were drawn, and a man killed. Whether he was the guilty one or not, it mattered little, as he was the first to fall into the hands of the officers. For a long time he had been kept in the chain-gang, but lately he had been sent to the silver mines, where he would probably end his days carrying ore on his back like a beast of burden, a thousand feet under ground.

She had a second daughter, old enough to carry food to her son while he was in prison, and to lighten his misery by a daily visit while he belonged to the chain-gang. But since he has been taken from the city, they two are left alone in the world. She has now no money, or she would get her daughter married, as the priest would trust her if she would only pay a small part of the fee. Still she is considered fortunate; for, having the reputation of an honest women, she has got a portress's situation, and little means are thrown in her way by which she obtains a comfortable living. But her relatives, who are poorer than herself, sympathize with her, and come and eat up her _tortillas_.

Such is the substance of many a tale of misery, if you will stop and listen to the pictures which the lowly draw of their condition in any of the Mexican cities. Often they are fabricated, but very often they are true. The old woman who tells you a tale to excite your sympathies has perhaps only borrowed a tale of misfortune which she has heard her neighbor tell. Those who reproach these poor unfortunates with being beggars, thieves, and liars, forget that they have been made such by oppression. The greatest amount of suffering caused by the civil wars falls upon the poor; and among the suffering poor, the women are the greatest sufferers. If they are more intemperate than the men, it is their misfortunes, too often, that have driven them to seek a temporary solace in _pulque_. The slight hold they have on their husbands is the cause of their jealousy, and if they take part in bloody affrays, it is because they are under the influence of intoxication, and not from any inherent inclination to cruelty.

Never did a white skin cover a kinder heart than that of the poor Meztizo women of Spanish America. Their primitive hut by the wayside is as much at your service as your own castle, and you are heartily welcome to their humble fare. I never was so unfortunate as to need their assistance, but I have often been astonished at the ready charity of the poor to those poorer than themselves. I once encountered an Irishman who had begged his way from the Gulf coast almost to the Pacific, and I was greatly surprised at the cheerfulness with which a poor widow woman, keeper of a _venta_, accepted of a blessing instead of more tangible coin for a night's entertainment. In delicate health always, and not without a full share of experience among strangers, I know full well how to appreciate the kind offices which a woman only can render. When death stared me in the face, and she could do nothing for a perishing heretic except to solicit a passing procession to chant a _misericordia por un infirmo Americano_, that kindly office was not wanting. When, with returning health, I ventured out into the street, leaning upon a staff, a poor Indian woman, forgetting her native shyness, begged me to sit down under the shade of her roof while she prepared for me a little orange-water, and when, a little refreshed by her orange-water, I tottered on, I shall never forget the look of sympathy which she bestowed upon an unknown stranger. An Indian woman is always kind, but the kindest of her race is the poor despised Indian woman of Spanish America.

It is too common to look down coldly, and not unfrequently with contempt, upon those who occupy the humbler walks of life, and to speak only of their vices. The _peon_ has his vices, and they are glaring enough, but he is certainly not worse than his white neighbor. I had been so long in California, and had seen so many exhibitions of courage in street-fights and personal encounters, that I had come almost to consider the words white man and brave man as synonymous. But when I found myself in Mexico at the breaking out of a civil war, I soon learned that white men are not always brave, and that they were superior to the Indian in little else except in the gilding with which they covered their vicious and corrupt lives. They borrow their customs from Paris and their style of living, but their morals are even below the Paris standard of virtue.

WOMAN'S RIGHTS AT MEXICO.

The law, which sinks the civil existence of the wife in the husband, and which charges the husband with liability for the debts and trespasses of the wife, is sometimes stigmatized as harsh, unnatural, and tyrannical. If those that consider it so could for a little while enjoy the matrimonial freedom of Mexico, they would soon discover abundant reason for praising the wisdom of our ancestors in hedging about with so many disabilities an institution which is both the safeguard of public morality and of our free government. Family government, self-government, and political freedom dwell together; while despotism and family license are inseparable. At Mexico, old family relations are not broken up by new marriages. Household family worship is unknown, but, like so many pagans, each one trudges off to say her prayers separately, and at a favorite shrine. The wife has her separate property and interests, which she manages with the aid of her "next friend." The husband, too, has his separate interests, and too often his "next friend" is his neighbor's wife.

After my return from Mexico, I heard a woman in a public assembly advocating, as social reforms, the institutions of a country in a state of moral and political decomposition. I felt like exclaiming, "Cursed be that woman who would introduce into our happy country the social customs of paganism; and cursed be that people who listen to her infidelity!" May a like evil fall upon those legislative tinkers who have deprived the husband of the power of creating a trust for the protection and support of his wife in time of necessity.

We have examined sufficiently the social condition of Mexico to show that there is no natural sympathy between the whites and the colored races, or the governing and governed races of Mexico. For a brief period, indeed, Guerrero, a man of Indian descent, occupied the presidency; but he was deposed and murdered, and the government has ever since been in the hands of the whites. The present Pinto war in the southwest looks toward again reviving the Indian rule. It is carried on too languidly to promise success, as there seems to be no one in the movement possessed of the energy of that Indian drummer, Carrera, who usurped the supreme power in Guatemala. On the other hand, Mexico is like a ripe pear, ready to fall into the lap of any unscrupulous adventurer who chooses to make common plunder of its churches, its church jewels, and the inordinate private fortunes of its priesthood and nobility.

MORMONISM AND MOHAMMEDANISM.

There is a rising cloud that is gathering blackness in the northwest, and must sooner or later precipitate itself and with the force of a tempest sweep away--to use the words of General Tornel--in one mighty flood "the religion, language, and national existence of the Mexicans." This is Mormonism. I have watched this delusion from its rise, near my own residence in Western New York, and followed its advancing progress, until, from a little rill, it has become a mighty torrent--a political element so potent that its existence in the United States is now scarcely tolerable. Where can it go except it precipitate itself upon the territories of imbecile Mexico? To such a sect of fanatics Mexico can present no opposition. It must surrender to Brigham Young and to his followers their wealth, their images, their wives and their daughters, as the Aztecs surrendered all to Cortez.

I have often traced the close analogy between the rise of Mormonism and that of Mohammedanism, as well as the striking similarity that exists between these two systems of false religion. Each one is founded, after a fashion, on the Bible, to which each has supplemented a volume of miserable fables, the one called the Book of Mormon, and the other the Koran. Each has a spurious prophet, who is exalted above the prophets of Scripture. Both systems permit polygamy, and both are most ultra-Protestant in relation to the forms and ceremonies, images and pictures of the Oriental and Latin churches. And as God sent the great Mohammedan imposture to punish the corrupt Christianity of a former age, so in like manner He may soon commission Mormonism to wipe out of existence the corrupt Christianity of Mexico. Mormonism has not yet developed a military character, because it would be madness to raise an arm against the United States. But when it shall have once passed the frontier and entered the dominions of a feeble state, then we shall see how keen an edge fanaticism can give to the sword in the hands of men naturally courageous, when the double motive is held out of a new supply of wives, and the inexhaustible treasures of the churches to stimulate their fanaticism.

[55] Having lost my memorandum, I am uncertain whether the number of days was one or more, and whether the number of _francs_ named was six or eight. The following is my best recollection of the question and answer on theft:

"_Q._ Is theft a grave offense?

"_A._ A theft that does not exceed in value a day's labor is not a grave offense; some theologians contend that a theft that does not exceed six francs is not a grave offense."

[56] I again quote the Catechism from recollection.

"_Q._ What is a venial sin?

"_A._ A lie that does not destroy charity among neighbors is a venial sin."