Page:The War with Mexico, Vol 1.djvu/61

32 revolutionary army, distinguished himself on the royal side for greed and bloodthirstiness. In 1814 he wrote to the Viceroy one Good Friday, "In honor of the day, I have just ordered three hundred excommunicated wretches to be shot," and the women among his prisoners fared no better than the men. On the other side Nicolas Bravo, whose father had been taken and executed, won a noble distinction by releasing about three hundred captives despite orders to kill them; Guadalupe Victoria, as he named himself, earned renown by living in caves like a wild beast rather than give up; and Vicente Guerrero, operating at the south in unexplored mountains, exhibited great resourcefulness, remarkable knowledge of men and extraordinary courage. The principal hero of this period, however, was Morelos, an Indian priest, who showed himself a consummate partisan leader?

So successful were these and the many other chiefs in terrorism, robbery, slaughter and sack, and so deep a sentiment in favor of independence now existed, that with a little sagacity in counsel and a little concert in action the cause might have triumphed; but ambitions, jealousies, insubordination, disloyalty and political incompetence ruined everything, and by the end of 1819, although Guerrero still made head a little, the second phase also of the revolution was substantially at an end, leaving behind it hot embers of turmoil, ﬁghting, treachery and massacre, and countless examples of making pillage a livelihood, selfish disregarding the common cause, and grossly blundering in political management. Thought and feeling in Mexico had, however, been so educated by reﬂection, experience, discussion and foreign comments during the past nine or ten years, that a longer acceptance of the old regime could not be expected. Absolutism, though triumphant, was doomed.

The fatal blow came from its champions. In 1820 a revolution in Spain revived the liberal constitution that had been adopted eight years before and then had been abolished by Ferdinand VII; and Apodaca, now Viceroy of Mexico, felt compelled to proclaim the new law. The troops and the people began to dread another civil war; and the oligarchy. especially the Church dignitaries, concluding at once that only separation from the mother-country could save their privileges,