Page:Vol 4 History of Mexico by H H Bancroft.djvu/137

Rh stationed there also declared for the cause of independence.

During the night and on the following morning the populace began to exhibit symptoms of violence, which afterward became uncontrollable. Having liberated the prisoners in the jail, with much uproar and cries of "Death to the gachupines!" they assembled in dense throngs before the houses of the Spanish residents, intent on pillage and destruction. Stores and private dwellings shared a like fate. Doors were battered in and the rabble ransacked and robbed ad libitum. Hidalgo endeavored to moderate these wild passions, and Allende, sword in hand, rode through the crowds threatening their death, until the disorder was stopped.

Our standpoint of morality depends on our teaching, if we still hold to our teachings, or to our line of independent thought, if we have any. The merchant's morality is different from that of the doctor, the priest's from that of the military man. While Hidalgo had as much conscience, as much heart and humanity, as Allende, whose profession was that of man-killer, he was now out on the work of an avenging angel, in so far as it was necessary for his work to assume that form. The Spaniards had robbed and insulted these many years. This was now to be stopped, whatever the cost. If the permission of pillage would add to the power of his cause, it were but small difference when the demon of murder was abroad. Our most refined and Christian civilization will kill human beings in battle by the hundred thousand, will commit horrible and wholesale butcheries without justice and without mercy, employing all the arts and advantages the mind can invent to injure and destroy the enemy—all for the cause, killing to prevent further killing; but over some few minor and comparatively