At Saltillo, the cemetery has two heaps of grinning skulls and bones that will measure 25,000 cubic feet of dead people who did not pay rent and were evicted.
A hundred dollars will buy the little word “perpituidad” on your tombstone, which will protect you till Gabriel sounds the final reveille.
I went back to my gate-keeper and said: “Now my good fellow, laying aside all jokes, what has Santa Anna done so noble as to give him a grave on this hill?”
He said this hill was a regular boom in real estate and that all his renters paid gilt-edge prices for beds, and as S. A. had the shekels, he got the bed. “And sir, if you have got the rocks, you can get lodging here.”
I declined with thanks, and told him I always carried a Coffin with me.
The road from Mexico to Guadalupe is three miles long, and has twelve stone shrines to commemorate the stations of the cross. All the pilgrims venerate these shrines on the march to Guadalupe. When Maximilian was meeting with such cool reception by the Mexicans, he walked the whole distance barefooted, in December, to win the good will of the Mexicans by apparent conformity to their customs. The Mexicans took him down to Queretaro and shot him.
I have gone thus minutely, and perhaps tediously, into the details of this legend to “find a moral and adorn the tale;” to expose the fraudulent practices and glaring deceit which the priest-hood has foisted upon the ignorant people. Whenever their hold upon the people seems to weaken, a cock-and-bull story like the one just told will awe the superstitious people by thousands to the rescue. Think of that humbug when the water was four years falling, and then the image getting the credit for it!
As a matter of fact, Mexico City was built upon an island only two feet higher than Lake Texcoco, a salt lake with no outlet, and both lake and city are in a crater, and all the water that falls in that forty mile valley must remain until evaporated, even though it takes four years to lower the height of a broken cloud-burst. After the water has evaporated to its usual level, why, the “Virgin lowered the water.”
Every priest in Mexico knows the geography of the valley and why the lake is salt, and why inundations take place even today in the principal streets of the city. In the light of this knowledge, their duping practices seem more reprehensible. Such is their hold, however, that since the church and state have been separated by law, several revolutions have been threatened because the state has attempted to interdict some of the senseless customs of the fiestas. Even within the last six years, the state proposed to put restrictions upon some of the ceremonies of Guadalupe, and had to recall the proposition to prevent a revolution.
It is encouraging to know that you never see an intelligent Mexican making a door-mat of himself before these shrines. He knows it is not worship as well as the priest, but there are thousands who are yet in the dark and the only hope of the priest-hood is continual ignorance of the masses, but education is weakening that every year. It is said that when an Indian earns two dollars, he gives one to the priest, forty-five cents for pulque, and supports his family with the remainder. As bad as that may look in print, I can say it is not far from an actual fact. Stand in front of that four million dollar church with all its useless finery, and then gaze at the thousands of beggars that crowd its steps and overflow to the street, who have to sit down to hide their nakedness and to better support their weak stomachs, and draw your own conclusion. And who ever heard of a Mexican church supporting a charity or raising a poor fund? Not I, and I have seen all of it. If these people had one tenth of the intelligence of the French Communes, they would walk into those churches and have a grand lottery drawing with no blanks.