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Rh system liberal studies were discouraged." In 1844, when Brantz Mayer was in the capital, the appropriation for the salaries of the professors in the university was $7,613. There was no appropriation for elementary schools. Of the colleges he says, "The students who live within the walls are expected to contribute for their education, while others, who only attend the lectures of the professors, are exempt from all costs and charges; so that about two-thirds of the pupils of every college receive their literary education gratuitously." Colleges appear to have been then as useless as the university; for out of a population of seven millions, less than seven hundred thousand could read.

In a well-known Church history published in 1878, it is said, "There is but one university in the country, that of the City of Mexico, founded in 1551, having twenty-two professors and a library of fifty thousand volumes." The statement,