Page:Vol 4 History of Mexico by H H Bancroft.djvu/29

Rh migration and population, regulating the administration of justice, creating and sustaining unnecessary officers, keeping among them standing armies, imposing taxes, interference in commerce, and other little things—there might have been to this day no separation from the mother country, except, indeed, it had been the falling-in-pieces from natural decay. I say such was the feeling before revolution was thought of; after the people began to consider, then certain of these minor wrongs seemed exceedingly exasperating. But behind all these, if not indeed one with them, were more serious evils. Looking well into the causes of Spanish American revolt, we find there the full catalogue of wrongs and injustice common to political subordinations of this nature, and in addition some of the blackest crimes within the power of tyranny to encompass. What were such matters as duties per cent, free coming and going, sumptuary regulations, or even local laws and legislation beside intellectual slavery, the enforcement of superstition, the subordination of soul, the degradation of both the mental and spiritual in man!

In regard to material impositions, probably one of the most outrageous as well as most absurd within the range of European colonization was that which denaturalized the son of the Spaniard born in America. What ridiculous nonsense for reasonable beings to act upon, not to say believe in, that the blood of him of pure Spanish parentage who first saw the light under the clear skies of the New World should thereby be politically and socially debased! Such was the royal edict, and to the end that all in Mexico might the more and forever be bound body and soul to Spain. Thus while pretending to parental care, the Spanish monarchs would reduce the colonists to the position of serfs.

In New Spain the first Creoles were identified