Page:Our Sister Republic - Mexico.djvu/155

Rh living creature, and I should loathe and despise myself beyond measure if I felt that I could be guilty of again witnessing such a scene. The entertainment was given in good faith as a compliment, and accepted as such; but such scenes can but brutalize and demoralize a community which tolerates them, and I thank God that enlightened public sentiment is now setting so strongly against them, that the day is not far distant when they will be prohibited by law in this State, as well as in all other parts of Mexico. I have had just enough of bull-fights for the measure of my life, be it large or small.

Every day I staid in Guadalajara, I saw something more to remind me of the fact that I stood among the dry bones of the past—that the world around me was a strange mixture and confusion of the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, the ideas of each struggling for the mastery. Utopian dreams of the future, and the savage faith and despotism of the past, jostle and crowd each other, day by day, and the end of the conflict is not yet. One day, I went out to see the Indian recruits for the Army of the Republic of Mexico, drilling on the plaza, and, returning, saw in the distance the tower of the ancient place of worship in the Indian village of Tonila, in which the curious earthen structures of which I have spoken are made. This Tonila was the capital of the Kingdom of Jalisco, when Cortez landed in Mexico, and there, the descendants of the fierce Aztec warriors still reside— making clay images, while their sons and brothers fight for the maintenance of Republicanism, side by side with the descendants of the conquistadors.

Reaching our sumptuous quarters I found on the