There is desolation everywhere. The poor people are too weak to withstand the strong rival with whom they have had to battle so long. Homes are broken up. Mothers with their little children are crying for help. Their cries are heard on every side. Powers of darkness sweep over the whole country.
The poor are driven like animals to the plantations to work for a few cents a day, not enough to sustain life. They are paid in advance for the season’s work. The wage is so small the family soon spend it all. Then they are arrested and made to work for what they have already received. Even mothers are put into the coffee and banana fields to work in the hot sun. On the poor tired women go with their babies strapped to their backs all day long, with nothing to eat but a tortilla (a corn cake baked without seasoning of any kind).
In the evening the poor tired people make their way to their little huts, which are made of a few sticks driven into the ground and covered with straw or palm leaves. There they grind corn for tortillas, the children carrying water in little buckets made of gourds that grow on trees, or in a jar made of clay. Their homes are as dirty as pig-pens, for the animals live in the house with the family.
As you travel through the country you find the very poor, who live in the mountains, far away from the cities, often whole families, without clothes. If they wear anything at all, it will be a piece of cloth woven from grass pinned around their bodies with a thorn, for they never saw a pin or button. Many boys and girls fourteen or fifteen years old have never worn clothes.
Both in the cities and in the country women are beasts of burden, for the women or the donkeys furnish the transportation, the men do not work much. The women work in the markets and little stores, and carry great loads of sugar, fruit, water, etc., on their heads in the hot sun. The streets are full of children that never were in school. They grow up to be lazy, fight with each other, and steal. When you have one around who is not saved you have to keep everything under lock and key.
More than two-thirds of the population are of illegitimate birth. Men and women live together and raise families, yet are never married. One of the difficult things the missionary has to do is see that they marry and live clean lives.
The priests charge so much money to perform the ceremony that the poor cannot pay it, so they live on year after year in this way; but they have to pay so much to the priests every year to get them to forgive their sin of adultery, in that way the Church of Rome gets more from them than they would to marry them. The priests prey upon the superstitions of the people to extract money from them at all points. The natives’ religion is a mere form of outward exercises.
For over 400 years the whole of Mexico, Central and South America, as well as the West Indies, have been under the heavy yoke of Romanism. The Spaniards came into the country and, driving the natives at the point of the sword, baptized them into the Roman Church, and took away their language and liberty. They compelled them to carry timber and stone from inland and build temples for the Roman Church.
