Page:The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14.djvu/66

56 leaders, or a few military chieftains, with their mercenary bands, are permitted to uphold or betray, to advance or trample under foot, great principles which with us excite every mind and arouse every heart. We believe it to be strictly true that a large portion of the Mexican people have not enough mental and moral activity to take an interest of any kind in these desolating wars,—much less to exercise that repressing influence by which the criminal ambition of the few must bow to the rights of the many. There could not be a worse sign. Popular ignorance, therefore, leading to popular apathy, must be put down among the influential causes of Mexican sorrows.

A third cause is that indifference to blood which appears to be characteristic of the Mexican people, or at least of that portion of them who have concerned themselves with public commotions. Some terrible elements have entered into this Mexican stock. The Spaniard, one of its sources, has written his name in blood in the history both of the Old and the New World. Whether hunting out the remnants of the unhappy Moriscos from the fastnesses of their native hills,—or torturing the Jews in the dungeons of his Inquisition,—or with lust and murder filling to the brim the cup of horror and misery for the captive cities of Holland,—or exterminating, in the pitiless labor of the mines, the peaceful aborigines of San Domingo,—or with Cortés putting to slaughter a whole city on mere suspicion,—everywhere the Spaniard has recorded great deeds with a pen of iron dipped in blood. And the Aztec, the other source of that stock, had, if we are to credit his conqueror, a cruel and merciless side to his character, which made him the peer of his oppressor.

The Mexican Revolution had its horrible chapters. And impartial truth demands that we should say that both sides made fearful contributions to those chapters. Hidalgo, the first popular leader, wrote to his lieutenant these terrible words:—"If you suspect your prisoners of entertaining restless or seditious ideas, bury them in oblivion at once by putting them to death in some secret and solitary place, where their fate may remain forever unknown." His practical commentary was a permission to his followers to slay every white whom they could find in the first stronghold which they stormed, and afterwards many a midnight execution in the gloomy ravines of the mountains. On the other hand, Calleja, the King's general, boasts that after the Battle of Aculco he put to death five thousand insurgents in cold blood. And Iturbide, then a Government general, writes, under date, "Good-Friday, 1814, In honor of the day I have just ordered three hundred excommunicated wretches to be shot":—a missive in which we know not which to admire most, the hideous brevity, the blasphemy, or the cruelty. One act of noble clemency stands out in peculiar sweetness from this background of horror. When Morelos had given to his lieutenant, Bravo, three hundred of the King's soldiers to be used as a ransom for his father, who was a prisoner in the hands of the Royalists, and when the viceroy, Venegas, scornfully rejected the offer, and ordered his victim to immediate execution, Bravo instantly set at liberty the soldiers:—"For I would wish," he said, "to put it out of my own power to avenge on them the death of a parent, lest, in the first moments of grief, the temptation should prove irresistible." The experiences of the Texan War, whose massacre of Alamo was the battle-cry of the borderers in all succeeding conflicts, and whose martyrdom at Goliad, where three hundred and fifty unarmed prisoners, trusting in the pledged faith of their captors, were led out in squads and shot, would seem to show that the tendencies of Mexican leaders and soldiers had not greatly changed in later times. What can result from such examples but utter carelessness of human life? But to destroy among any people the sacredness of life is to erase one of the safeguards of peace and order. The nation which does