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 102 MEXICO. pressed, and assurances given of a readiness to assist her in her struggle against the forces of her invader. It is difficult now to ascertain how far these professions of attachment to the Mother country, on the part of the new Governments, were sincere. Many of their members, un- doubtedly, aspired to independence from the first ; but the majority would have been satisfied with moderate reforms; and it was, perhaps, the necessity of conciliating these, as well as the great mass of the people, (who certainly were not prepared to throw off their allegiance at once,) that forced the bolder spirits to temporize, and to disguise their real de- signs, under the mask of devoted loyalty. Be this as it may, the good understanding which the Creoles seemed to court, was but of short duration. The jealousy excited amongst the Europeans, by the loss of an authority which they re- garded as their patrimony, their irritating language, and the violence of their conduct wherever the presence of European troops gave them even a momentary ascendancy, soon showed the real nature of the contest. Contempt, and domineering habits, on the one side, begot hatred, and obstinate resist- ance on the other : rigour led to. reprisals, reprisals to habi- tual cruelty ; and thus the war acquired, very soon after its commencement, that sanguinary character, which nothing but private animosity, engrafted on a public quarrel, can explain, and which not even that can excuse. It is a curious fact, that the importance of these great events was not, at first, felt in the Peninsula ; or if felt, was, at least, greatly underrated. So little was the character of the Creoles known, and so high the opinion entertained of the superior resources of Spain, that neither the Regency, nor the Cortes, which met, (as I have already stated,) in September, 1810, would ever take the subject into serious consideration. The First thought to quell the spirit of insurrection in Ye- neziiela) (where the flame first broke out,) by sending there