Page:Vol 4 History of Mexico by H H Bancroft.djvu/830

814 nations are composed of high and low, good and bad, so their common aim, be, it never so lofty, must even partake of the different ingredients.

The people of New Spain were more pliable and long-suffering than their northern neighbors, but lacked their self-control and adhesion to principle, and fell more readily into extremes, allowing mind and heart to be obscured by passion. Hence a war stamped by relentless and bloody retaliation on both sides, due alternately to passion and weakness. The royalists were at first impelled by a sense of self-preservation, which acted on the belief early instilled that strong measures were required to impress rebels; subsequently they were roused by the bandit-like raids of the guerrillas. Policy should have urged them to imitate oftener the magnanimous example set by men like Bravo and Mina. We have long ceased to wonder at the absence of any considerable mollifying influence of religion where men's passions are aroused.

This calls up a peculiar feature of the struggle in the prominent part played by the church. Both sides professed to be its champion, using it now as a cloak, anon as enginery, and stirring to move into vindictive activity a contest rife with hate and fanaticism. Although the upper clergy were essentially for the royalists, yet they finally turned the scale by which the revolutionists triumphed. If the price paid for the alliance was in later times to prove costly, it must also be remembered that the common fanaticism, however bloody, served as a bond which prevented an additional and probably more horrible war of races.

Several of the foremost leaders, too, were priests. Men who longed to give vent on the battle-field to feelings pent beneath the robe, to liberate suppressed ambition and patriotic instincts, found every encouragement to assume the lead, through their influence as guides and rulers over devoted flocks which respected them for their character and acquirements, and felt impressed by their directing minds. Their