Duties, taxes, and tithes were the vexatious instruments of royal plunder. The alcabala, an impost upon all purchases and sales, including even the smallest transactions, was perhaps the most burthensome. "Every species of merchandise, whenever it passed from one owner to another, was subject to a new tax; and merchants, shopkeepers and small dealers, were obliged to report the amount of their purchases and sales under oath." From the acquisition of an estate, to the simple sale of butter, eggs, or vegetables in market, all contracts and persons were subject to this tax, except travellers, clergymen and paupers. Independently of the destruction of trade, which must always ensue from such a system, the reader will at once observe the temptations to vice opened by it. The natural spirit of gain tempts a dealer to cheat an oppressive government by every means in his power. It is therefore not wonderful to find the country filled with contrabandists, and the towns with dishonest tradesmen. Men who defraud in acts, will lie in words, nor will they hesitate to conceal their infamy under the sanction of an oath. Thus was it that the oppressive taxation of Spain became the direct instrument of popular corruption, and, by extending imposts to the minutest ramifications of society, it made the people smugglers, cheats, and perjurers. In addition to the alcabala, there were transit duties through the country, under which, it has been alleged, that European articles were sometimes taxed thirty times before they reached their consumer. The king had his royal fifth of all the gold and silver, and his monopolies of tobacco, salt and gunpowder. He often openly vended the colonial offices, both civil and ecclesiastical. He stamped paper, and derived a revenue from its sale. He affixed a poll tax on every Indian; and, finally, by the most infamous of all impositions, he derived an extensive revenue from the religious superstition of the people. It was not enough to tax the necessaries and luxuries of life,—things actually in existence and tangible,—but, through a refined alchemy of political invention, he managed to coin even the superstitions of the people, and add to the royal income by the sale of "Bulls de cruzada"—"Bulls de defuntos,"—"Bulls for eating milk and eggs during lent,"—and "Bulls of composition." Bales upon bales of these badly printed licenses were sent out from Spain and sold by priests under the direction of a commissary. The villany of this scheme may be more evident if we detain the reader a moment in order to describe the character of these spiritual licenses. Whoever possessed a "Bull de cruzada" might be absolved from all crimes except heresy; nor, could he be suspected even of so deadly a sin, as long as this talismanic paper was in his possession. Besides this, it exempted him from many of the rigorous fasts of the church; while two of them, of course, possessed double the virtue of one. The "Bull for the dead" was a needful passport for a sinner's soul from purgatory. There was no escape without it from the satanic police, and the poor and ignorant classes suffered all the pains of their miserable friends who had gone to the other world, until they were able to purchase the inestimable ticket of release. But of all these wretched impostures, the "Bull of composition" was, probably, the most shameful as well as dangerous. It "released persons who had stolen goods from the obligation to restore them to the owner, provided the thief had not been moved to commit his crime in consequence of a belief that he might escape from its sin by subsequently purchasing the immaculate 'Bull.'" Nor were these all the virtues of this miraculous document. It had the power to "correct the moral offence of false weights and measures; tricks and frauds in trade; all the obliquities of principle and conduct by which swindlers rob honest folks of their property; and, finally, whilst it converted stolen articles into the lawful property of the thief, it also assured to purchasers the absolute ownership of whatever they obtained by modes that ought to have brought them to the gallows. The price of these Bulls depended on the amount of goods stolen; but it is just to add, that only fifty of them could be taken by the same person in a year."[23]

These disgusting details might suffice to show the student how greatly America was oppressed and corrupted by the Spanish government; yet we regret that there are other important matters of misrule which we are not authorised to pass by unnoticed. Thus far we have considered the direct administration and taxing power of the king and Council of the Indies; we must now turn to the despotism exercised over the mind as well as the body of the creoles.

The holy church held all its appointments directly from the king, though the pope enjoyed the privilege of nomination; consequently the actual influence and power of the Hispano-American church, rested in the sovereign. The Recopilacion de las leyes expressly prohibits the erection of cathedrals, parish churches, monasteries, hospitals, native chapels, or other pious or religious edifices, without the express license of the monarch. [24] As all the ecclesiastical revenues went to him, his power and patronage were immense. The religious jurisdiction of the church tribunals extended to monasteries, priests, donations, or legacies for sacred purposes, tithes, marriages, and all spiritual concerns. The fueros of the clergy have been already alluded to. "Instead of any restraint on the claims of the ecclesiastics," says Dr. Robertson, "the inconsistent zeal of the Spanish legislators admitted them into America to their full extent, and, at once imposed on the Spanish colonies a burden which is in no slight degree oppressive to society in its most improved state. As early as 1501 the payment of tithes as it was called, in the colonies was enjoined, and the mode of it regulated by law. Every article of primary necessity towards which the attention of settlers must naturally be turned was submitted to that grievous exaction. Nor were the demands of the clergy confined to articles of simple and easy culture. Its more artificial and operose productions, such as sugar, indigo, and cochineal, were declared to be titheable, and, in this manner, the planter's industry was taxed in every stage of its progress from its rudest essay to its highest improvement." [25] Thus it is that even now, after all the desolating revolutions that have occurred, we see the wealth of the Mexican church so exorbitantly exceeding that of the richest lay proprietors. The clergy readily became the royal agents in this scheme of aggrandizement; convent after convent was built; estate after estate was added to their possessions; dollar after dollar, and diamond after diamond were cast into their gorged treasuries, until their present accumulations are estimated at a sum not far beneath one hundred millions. [26] The monasteries of the Dominicans and Carmelites possess immense riches, chiefly in real estate both in town and country; whilst the convents of nuns in the city of Mexico,—especially those of Concepcion, Encarnacion and Santa Terasa,—are owners of three-fourths of the private houses in the capital, and proportionably, of property in the different states of the republic. [27]

Wherever the church of Rome obtained a foothold in the sixteenth century the Holy Inquisition was not long in asserting and establishing its power. Unfortunately for the zealots of this monastic tribunal, the ignorance of the Indians did not permit them to wander into the mazes of heresy, so that the Dominican monks found but slender employment for their cruel skill. The poor aborigines were hardly worth the trouble of persecution, for the conquerors had already plundered them, and, unfortunately, the Jews did not emigrate to the wilds of America. The inquisition, however, could not restrain its natural love of labor, so, that, diverting its attention from the bodies of its victims it devoted itself, with the occasional recreation of an auto da fe, to the spiritual guardianship of Spanish and Indian intellects. Education was of course modified and repressed by such baneful influences. Men dared neither learn nor read, except what was selected for them by the monks. At the end of the eighteenth century there were but three presses in Spanish America,—one in Mexico, one in Lima, and one which belonged to the Jesuits at Cordova; but these presses were designed for the use of the government alone in the dissemination of its decrees. The eye of the inquisition was of course jealously directed to all publications. Booksellers were bound to furnish the Holy Fathers annually with a list of their merchandise, and the fraternity was empowered to enter wheresoever it pleased, to seek and seize prohibited literature. Luther, Calvin, Vattel, Montesquieu, Puffendorff, Robertson, Addison, and even the Roman Catholic Fenelon, were all proscribed. The inquisition was the great censor of the press, and nothing was submitted to the people unless it had passed the fiery ordeal of the holy office. It was quite enough for a book to be wise, classical, or progressive, to subject it to condemnation. Even viceroys and governors were forbidden to license the publication of a work unless the inquisition sanctioned it; and we have seen volumes in Mexico, still kept as curiosities in private libraries, out of which pages were torn and passages obliterated by the Holy Fathers, before they were permitted to be sold. [28]

Inasmuch as the Indians formed the great bulk of Hispano-American population, the king, of course, soon after the discovery, directed his attention to their capabilities for labor. We have seen in a previous part of this chapter that by a system of repartimientos they were divided among the conquerors and made vassals of the land holders, although always kept distinct from the negroes who were afterwards imported from Africa. Although the Emperor Charles V., enacted a number of mild laws for the amelioration of their fate, their condition seems, nevertheless, to have been very little improved,—according to our personal observation,—even to the present day. We have noticed that a capitation tax was levied on every Indian, and that it varied in different parts of Spanish America, from four to fifteen dollars, according to the ability of the Indians. They were likewise doomed to labor on the public works, as well as to cultivate the soil for the general benefit of the country, whilst by the imposition of the mita they were forced to toil in the mines under a rigorous and debasing system which the world believed altogether unequalled in mineral districts until the British parliamentary reports of a few years past disclosed the fact, that even in England, men and women are sometimes degraded into beasts of burden in the mines whose galleries traverse in every direction the bowels of that proud kingdom. [29] Toils and suffering were the natural conditions of the poor Indian in America after the conquest, and it might have been supposed that the plain dictates of humanity would make the Spaniards content with the labor of their serfs, without attempting afterwards, to rob them of the wages of such ignominious labor. But even in this, the Spanish ingenuity and avarice were not to be foiled, for the corregidores in the towns and villages, to whom were granted the minor monopolies of almost all the necessaries of life, made this a pretext of obliging the Indians to purchase what they required at the prices they chose to affix to their goods. Monopoly—was the order of the day in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Its oppressions extended through all ranks, and its grasping advantages were eagerly seized by every magistrate from the alguazil to the viceroy. The people groaned, but paid the burthensome exaction, whilst the relentless officer, hardened by the contemplation of misery, and the constant commission of legalized robbery, only became more watchful, sagacious and grinding in proportion as he discovered how much the down-trodden masses could bear. Benevolent viceroys and liberal kings, frequently interposed to prevent the continuance of these unjust acts, but they were unable to cope with the numerous officials who performed all the minor ministerial duties throughout the colony. These inferior agents, in a new and partially unorganized country, had every advantage in their favor over the central authorities in the capital. The poorer Spaniards and the Indian serfs had no means of making their complaints heard in the palace. There was no press or public opinion to give voice to the sorrows of the masses, and personal fear often silenced the few who might have reached the ear of merciful and just rulers. At court, the rich, powerful and influential miners or land holders, always discovered pliant tools who were ready by intrigue and corruption to smother the cry of discontent, or to account plausibly for the murmurs, which upon extraordinary occasions, burst through all restraints until they reached either the Audiencia or the representative of the sovereign. These slender excuses may, in some degree, account for and palliate the maladministration of Spanish America from the middle of the sixteenth to the beginning of the nineteenth century.

*****

The ensuing chapters of this book contain the annals of New Spain from the foundation of the viceroyal system to the beginning of the revolution that grew out of its corruptions. The materials for this portion of Mexican history are exceedingly scant. During the jealous despotism and ecclesiastical vigilance of old Spanish rule, and the anarchy of modern miscalled republicanism, few authors have ventured to penetrate the gloom of this mysterious period. The Jesuit Father Cavo, and Don Carlos Maria Bustamante have alone essayed to narrate, consecutively, the events of the viceroyalty; and although no student of the past is attracted by their crude and careless style, yet we may confidently rely on the characteristic facts detailed in their tedious work. [30]

Footnotes

[19] Recop. de las leyes, lib. 2, title 2, ley 2.