Page:Mexico, Aztec, Spanish and Republican, Vol 1.djvu/152

136 them to wander into the mazes of heresy, so that the Dominican monks found but slender employment for their cruel skill. The poor aborigines were hardly worth the trouble of persecution, for the conquerors had already plundered them, and, unfortunately, the Jews did not emigrate to the wilds of America. The inquisition, however, could not restrain its natural love of labor, so, that, diverting its attention from the bodies of its victims it devoted itself, with the occasional recreation of an auto da fe, to the spiritual guardianship of Spanish and Indian intellects. Education was of course modified and repressed by such baneful influences. Men dared neither learn nor read, except what was selected for them by the monks. At the end of the eighteenth century there were but three presses in Spanish America,—one in Mexico, one in Lima, and one which belonged to the Jesuits at Cordova; but these presses were designed for the use of the government alone in the dissemination of its decrees. The eye of the inquisition was of course jealously directed to all publications. Booksellers were bound to furnish the Holy Fathers annually with a list of their merchandise, and the fraternity was empowered to enter wheresoever it pleased, to seek and seize prohibited literature. Luther, Calvin, Vattel, Montesquieu, Puffendorff, Robertson, Addison, and even the Roman Catholic Fenelon, were all proscribed. The inquisition was the great censor of the press, and nothing was submitted to the people unless it had passed the fiery ordeal of the holy office. It was quite enough for a book to be wise, classical, or progressive, to subject it to condemnation. Even viceroys and governors were forbidden to license the publication of a work unless the inquisition sanctioned it; and we have seen volumes in Mexico, still kept as curiosities in private libraries, out of which pages were torn and passages obliterated by the Holy Fathers, before they were permitted to be sold.

Inasmuch as the Indians formed the great bulk of Hispano-American population, the king, of course, soon after the discovery, directed his attention to their capabilities for labor. We have seen in a previous part of this chapter that by a system of repartimientos they were divided among the conquerors and made vassals of the land holders, although always kept distinct from the negroes who were afterwards imported from Africa. Although the Emperor Charles V., enacted a number of mild laws for the amelioration of their fate, their condition seems, nevertheless, to have been very little improved,—according to our personal observation,—even to