Page:Mexico as it was and as it is.djvu/217

170 distinctness. Besides this, the foliage is fuller, the forests thicker, the sky milder, and everything betokens the sway of a bland and tropical climate.

A bend of the road around a precipice, revealed to us the town of Cuernavaca, lying beyond the forest in the lap of the valley, while far in the east the mountains were lost in the plain, like a distant line of sea. Our company gathered together, on the announcement of the first sight of our port of destination for the night. It was decided, by the novices in Mexican travelling, that it could not be more distant than a couple of leagues at farthest; but long was the weary ride, descending and descending, with scarcely a perceptible decrease of space, before we reached the city.

In the course of this afternoon we passed through several Indian villages, and saw numbers of people at work in the fields by the road side. Two things struck me: first, the miserable hovels in which the Indians are lodged, in comparison with which a decent dog-kennel at home is a comfortable household; and second, the fact that this, although the Sabbath, was no day of repose to these ever-working, but poor and thriftless people. Many of the wretched creatures were stowed away under a roof of thatch, stuck on the bare ground with a hole left at one end to crawl in!

What can be the benefit of a Republican form of government to masses of such a population? They have no ambition to improve their condition, or in so plenteous a country it would be improved; they are content to live and lie like the beasts of the field; they have no qualifications for self-government, and they can have no hope, when a life of such toil avails not to avoid such misery. Is it possible for such men to become Republicans? It appears to me that the life of a negro, under a good master, in our country, is far better than the beastly degradation of the Indian here. With us, he is at least a man; but in Mexico, even the instincts of his human nature are scarcely preserved.

It is true that these men are free, and have the unquestionable liberty, after raising their crop of fruits or vegetables, to trot with it fifty or sixty miles, on foot to market, where the produce of their toil is, in a few hours, spent, either at the gambling table or the pulqué shop. After this they have the liberty, as soon as they get sober, to trot back again to their kennels in the mountains, if they are not previously lassoed by some recruiting sergeant, and forced to "volunteer " in the army. Yet what is the worth of such purposeless liberty or the worth of such purposeless life? There is not a single ingredient of a noble-spirited and highminded mountain peasantry in them. Mixed in their races, they have been enslaved and degraded by the conquest; ground into abject servility during the Colonial government; corrupted in spirit by the superstitious rites of an ignorant priesthood; and now, without hope, without education, without other interest in their welfare, than that of some good-hearted