Page:Mexico as it was and as it is.djvu/425

 344 of which is subject to the review of the President of the Republic and of a Governor appointed by the President.

Title eighth, relates to the E P.

The population of Mexico is divided into sections of five hundred inhabitants for the election of primary Juntas, and the citizens will vote, by ticket, for one elector for every five hundred inhabitants. These primary electors will name the secondary, who are to form the E C of the Department in the ratio of one secondary elector for every twenty of the primary. This Electoral College, again, will elect the Deputies to Congress, and the members of the Departmental Assembly; and its members must have an income qualification of at least five hundred dollars per annum.

On the 1st of November of the year previous to the expiration of the Presidential term, each Departmental Assembly, by a majority of votes, or, in case of a tie, by lot, will select a person as President for the succeeding five years. There is no clause in the Instrument limiting the term or terms for which an individual may be elected, or prescribing a mode of supplying the vacancy occasioned by his death, resignation, or incompetency.

Such is an outline of the chief features of this remarkable Document. At its opening, it declares the establishment of a Popular Representative Government, yet nothing can be less popular in its provisions than the Instrument itself. The people are divided into classes of Citizens and Inhabitants. Property qualifications are created, while domestic servants, and the clergy, (no matter how honest, excellent and virtuous they may be,) are disfranchised in the same category with gamblers and drunkards, though they possess both the required income and education.

The opinion of the people is not to be taken directly by vote in regard to the men who are to represent them in the Departments and in Congress, or to govern them in the Presidency; but their sentiments are to be filtered through three bodies of Electors before their representation is finally effected. And, last of all, the supreme power is vested in a C Government, while the people are led with scarce a shadow of authority over their homes and interests in the Departments.

It will be at once observed, that President Santa Anna has thus succeeded in enforcing his favorite scheme of Centralism. He must, therefore, become directly responsible for its results, whether for evil or for good, and the glory or disgrace of his country, in the estimation of all foreign countries, must alight upon his head alone.