Page:Mexico in 1827 Vol 1.djvu/131

Rh of some of the more enlightened amongst the Europeans themselves, to bring the most notorious offenders to justice, were equally fruitless. They were frustrated, partly by the rank and influence of the transgressors, and partly by that spirit of clanship, (I can find no other word to express what I mean,) by which the Europeans, of every description, were united amongst themselves. One must have been in America, to have any idea of the extent to which this feeling was carried. It became, at last, a passion, which induced them to prefer the ties of country to the ties of blood. The son, who had the misfortune to be born of a Creole mother, was considered as an inferior, in the house of his own father, to the European book-keeper, or clerk, for whom the daughter, if there were one, and a large share of the fortune, were reserved. "Eres Criollo, y basta:"—(you are a Creole, and that is enough!) was a common phrase amongst the Spaniards, when angry with their children; and was thought to express all the contempt that it is in the power of language to convey. It was a term of ignominy, a term of reproach, until time taught those, to whom it was applied, to use it rather as an honourable distinction, and to oppose it to that of Gachupin, as designating the party of those infatuated men, who imagined, that the circumstance of having been born in the arid plains of Castille, or La Mancha, gave them a moral, and intellectual superiority, over all the inhabitants of the New World. Not the least