Page:Vol 3 History of Mexico by H H Bancroft.djvu/770

749 them alone the term gente de razon, rational people, as unfit to hold office or to govern themselves. With the growth of education among the better class they attained to the superior designation of ladinos, and laws opened the portal to civil and ecclesiastic offices, and to the orders; yet none but persons of great influence such as nobles managed to enter even the latter precincts. Certain few of the cacique class obtained military rank, but most of them had to rest content with petty municipal positions in the villages, of which they made the most by claiming exemptions, or even tribute, and joining the officials in oppressing the rest. A large portion obtained only a nominal recognition of their rank as nobles, and merged otherwise in the mass with little or no distinction in dress, mode of life, or attainments, affecting poverty even when rich. More conscious than the plebeians of the humility heaped upon them, rather than be buffeted by the arrogant whites they preferred to hide among their own race, nursing there together with the remembrance of ancestral glories a slumbering hatred or tenacious aversion for the invaders and their institutions which contributed to check advancement.

The impression left by most writers on the Indian question is that of a race ground into the dust by oppression, but their material condition was after all much better than that of the lowest classes in Europe, favored as they were by a beneflcent nature which called for little of the exhaustive toil falling to the lot of the laborer in civilized Germany or England. In later colonial times the despotism of official or employer was rarely severe enough to evoke despair or lamentation, and indignation must be confined rather to the measures which restrained the liberty and