Page:Mexico, Aztec, Spanish and Republican, Vol 1.djvu/151

Rh edifices, without the express license of the monarch. As all the ecclesiastical revenues went to him, his power and patronage were immense. The religious jurisdiction of the church tribunals extended to monasteries, priests, donations, or legacies for sacred purposes, tithes, marriages, and all spiritual concerns. The fueros of the clergy have been already alluded to. "Instead of any restraint on the claims of the ecclesiastics," says Dr. Robertson, "the inconsistent zeal of the Spanish legislators admitted them into America to their full extent, and, at once imposed on the Spanish colonies a burden which is in no slight degree oppressive to society in its most improved state. As early as 1501 the payment of tithes as it was called, in the colonies was enjoined, and the mode of it regulated by law. Every article of primary necessity towards which the attention of settlers must naturally be turned was submitted to that grievous exaction. Nor were the demands of the clergy confined to articles of simple and easy culture. Its more artificial and operose productions, such as sugar, indigo, and cochineal, were declared to be titheable, and, in this manner, the planter's industry was taxed in every stage of its progress from its rudest essay to its highest improvement." Thus it is that even now, after all the desolating revolutions that have occurred, we see the wealth of the Mexican church so exorbitantly exceeding that of the richest lay proprietors. The clergy readily became the royal agents in this scheme of aggrandizement; convent after convent was built; estate after estate was added to their possessions; dollar after dollar, and diamond after diamond were cast into their gorged treasuries, until their present accumulations are estimated at a sum not far beneath one hundred millions. The monasteries of the Dominicans and Carmelites possess immense riches, chiefly in real estate both in town and country; whilst the convents of nuns in the city of Mexico,—especially those of Concepcion, Encarnacion and Santa Terasa,—are owners of three-fourths of the private houses in the capital, and proportionably, of property in the different states of the republic.

Wherever the church of Rome obtained a foothold in the sixteenth century the was not long in asserting and establishing its power. Unfortunately for the zealots of this monastic tribunal, the ignorance of the Indians did not permit