Page:The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14.djvu/64

54. "Are there any robbers on this route?" asked Baron Deffandis, as he travelled in the North of Mexico. "Oh, no!" was the answer; "you have nothing to fear; in this part of the country there are no rational people,"—the speaker remaining all unconscious of the bitter satire which was hidden in his words.

Above the half-bloods were the Creoles, the children of white parents and born in the Colony. Even they were doomed to feel the sting of inferiority. They had no real political liberty, and no place in the State. No royal trust was ever committed to them. The places of public emolument were closed against them. All were reserved for Spaniards, born in Spain. Of fifty-six Mexican viceroys but one was a Creole, and he a Creole of Peru. It is the boast of a Frenchman, that in his country, in its most despotic days, the people have always had their songs, and that their writers have dared to breathe forth their maledictions upon the oppression which has loaded them with exactions. But in Spain and her colonies the Inquisition weighed heavily upon free speech, and enforced upon all the higher subjects of human thought a silence like the grave. The Creole scarcely knew that there was any world beyond his horizon, or that there could be a better than his empty and barren life; or if he did know more, he must keep that knowledge in the solitude of his own breast. All that the Spaniard vouchsafed to him was the liberty to achieve wealth, which opened to him no career of usefulness and distinction. At most, he loaded himself with cheap decorations, to which there was no answering position of responsibility. "One is surprised," says a tourist, "to see all the traders turned into colonels and captains, and to find officers of the militia in full uniform, and decorated with the badge of the order of Charles III., seated in their shops, weighing out sugar, coffee, and vanilla." But as for any real distinction, the Creole had none. These empty titles sufficed to separate him in feeling yet more from the great mass of his countrymen, but they did not satisfy those aspirations for real dignity and freedom which cannot quite die out in any breast.

We see, then, what a fatal legacy the mother-country left to her rebellious child: four castes,—the Spaniard, hated by all; the Creole, proud, hospitable, and brave, but by his very training incapable of persistent energy; the half-breed, wild and untamable, a natural brigand and guerrilla; and the Indian, subdued, sad, and patient, yet with a drop of the fierce and cruel blood of his Aztec progenitor coursing in his veins.

The first act in the drama of the Mexican Revolution showed how great an obstacle to national unity this sentiment of caste was. When the priest Hidalgo in the year 1810 raised the standard of rebellion, though the Creole heart was throbbing almost to bursting with the desire for freedom, yet the Creole population nearly in a body sided with the Government. Do you ask why? The answer is simple. Hidalgo's followers were Indians. And all through that prolonged struggle of ten years under Morelos, Vittoria, Teran, and countless other partisan leaders, even to that hour when the rebellion was extinguished in its own blood, it was the Creole who stood between the Spaniard and destruction, and who, through his fear and jealousy of the native races, was the accomplice in binding heavier chains on his own limbs. When in 1820 the revolt passed out of the hand of the Indian into that of the native white, the struggle was over. The hundred thousand foreigners were impotent, when they stood alone.

We do not say that this jealousy and dislike have not been greatly modified by the lapse of years and by the endurance of common sufferings. No doubt there has been a great improvement. There would be small hope for the country, if it were not so. But these feelings have not by any means been altogether eradicated. An intelligent writer, as lately as last year, speaking of the difficulties which the Liberal Government, now overthrown