Page:Mexico as it was and as it is.djvu/426

 Rh Qualifications, property, and the intrenchments of power, fortify him on every side. He is very distant from the people. The four millions of Mexican Indians, (scarcely one of whom ever had an annual income of two hundred dollars in his life,) must always be unrepresented in the Government. No hope is proposed to them of advancement or regeneration; while the Chief Magistrate, himself, is surrounded by a complicated machine, that wants every element of democratic simplicity, and possesses a thousand inlets to corruption and mismanagement. If it operates well, it secures strong central authority. If it operates badly, it must break to pieces like some cumbrous engine destroyed by the confusion and multiplicity of its forces.

In either event, the President may deem himself safe. If the Bases succeed in giving peace, progress, and prosperity to Mexico, he will have the honor of the movement. But if he finds that they are not efficacious, or are likely to injure his schemes, it will be a task neither of difficulty nor danger, in so complicated a maze, to loosen some trifling screw, or throw some petty wheel from its axle, by which the whole must be disarranged without the responsibility of even its humblest engineers.

So long as the President rules under an instrument which gives him complete control of the army, the power to declare war, entire patronage of the civil list, the right to impose fines, veto laws, and interfere with the judiciary;—he will possess an authority too great to be intrusted to any one individual in our day and generation.

In the preceding sketch of Mexican Republicanism for the last twenty years, you will observe that I have not aimed to give an extended notice of the various leaders who placed themselves at the head of different movements. I have not done so, because I perceived no evidence of a progressive principle throughout the revolutions. The Government has generally been strong enough to suppress all disturbances but those that were countenanced by Santa Anna. With a true love of freedom among a few, a scramble for power among others, and carelessness or supineness among the great body of the people,—the country has gone on blundering from revolution to revolution, without advancing nearer to liberty and enlightenment than did the Barons of old when they sallied forth on feudal forays against each other.