Page:History of California, Volume 3 (Bancroft).djvu/203

Rh one. The opponents of Victoria were thus in the wrong at the beginning of the quarrel.

While at Santa Bárbara Victoria heard of the decree of January 6th and prevented its publication in the south; while he reported the matter to the national authorities, denouncing Padrés, whom of course he had known well in Baja California, as the real author of the trick and as a man who was very dangerous to the best interests of the territory. In the north, where the decree had been already published, the new ruler took immediate steps to prevent its execution. Nothing more need be said here of secularization, but the wrath of the ayudante inspector and his party may well be imagined by the reader, and will be constantly apparent in the subsequent record.

Having assumed the command, Victoria issued the 1st of February an address to the people, a brief document, in which the author made known to his 'beloved fellow-citizens' his purpose to reform the evils that most afflicted the country, and his hope for cordial support from the inhabitants. "The laws must be executed, the government obeyed, and our institutions respected," he writes; "I have to favor honesty and to punish perversity, the first being in accord with my character, the second demanded by my honor and conscience." All of this officer's communications, or at least all that have been preserved, were brief and to the point, showing the writer to be more of a soldier than politician, and lacking something of the usual Mexican bombast. Of his personal