Page:Our Neighbor-Mexico.djvu/138

128 said to be favorable to annexation, because they can get yet larger liberties under our government than are allowed them here. No one is permitted to appear in his official costume in the streets of this city. Religious processions are proscribed. The holy wafer is carried to dying people no longer in a gilded coach, but in a private carriage, the bared head of the driver being the only sign by which the faithful can know it, and can fall on their knees on its passing by. So great has this irreverence grown, that a native gentleman, pointing to the sagrario where this coach is still kept, said to me, "They keep in there what they call 'the Holy Ghost coach,' but I call it the hell-cart." Could disrespect go further?

The confiscation of Church property was an enormous loss of Church power. It held two-thirds of this city in its possession. It held mortgages in as large a portion of the country. Letting its money at a low figure and on liberal and long terms, it gradually became an enormous savings-bank, and controlled the whole landed interest of the country. Its convents covered hundreds of acres in the heart of the city, and were adorned in the highest degree that art and wealth could devise. Gardens, lakes, parks, pillars elegantly wrought in polished marble, churches of splendor in construction and ornamentation, were the unseen luxurious abodes of the world-denying friars and nuns. Corruption of the most startling sort abounded; and money, the sinews of the state, was in the hands exclusively of the corrupted and corrupters.

Good men may have been involved in this arrangement, may have presided over it. Good men have been connected with every controlling evil that the world has ever seen. An Orthodox Congregational minister called his burning satire against New England's demoralization under rum "Deacon Giles's Distillery," and the slave-holding system of English West Indies was supported by rectors of the Established Church, and of our own land by ministers of all churches in the South. So we are all in condemnation, and none can throw stones at the former growth to financial power of the Roman Church in Mexico.

Indeed, it has its eloquent advocates to-day. A lady of high