CHAPTER XXIII.
The new City of Mexico.—The Discoveries of Gold.—Ruins at Mexico.—The Monks, and what Cortéz gained by his Piety.—The City of Mexico again rebuilt.—The City under Ravillagigedo.—The National Palace.—The Cathedral.—A whole Museum turned Saints.—All kneel together.—The San Carlos Academy of Arts.—Reign of Carlos III—The Mineria.
The city of Mexico, as rebuilt by Cortéz, was but an humble affair. The small amount of plunder realized from the city destroyed; the necessity for large remittances to secure peace at the Spanish court; the general poverty and destitution of the Indians inhabiting the surrounding villages, and the narrow limits of the Aztec empire, were great impediments in the way of erecting a magnificent city. On a small scale, he resembled Santa Anna in the activity with which he could organize an army after defeat, or resuscitate affairs when apparently irretrievable. He knew how to improve the most slender means to the accomplishment of ulterior purposes. Perseverance is not one of the leading characteristics of the Spanish race, yet it is surprising to see how much they will often accomplish with what would appear to us totally inadequate means. Such was eminently the talent of Cortéz. Surrounded by disappointed men, who had been lured to the country by magnificent pictures of its resources, he still went on extending his conquests among the surrounding tribes.
Fortunately, the most precious of all metals is obtained by the most simple process, and the gold-washings of the Mescala and other parts of the south, which the Indians had but partially wrought, received more attention as soon as they learned how readily the precious metal could be exchanged for the gewgaws of the Europeans. Gold dust was greedily exchanged for its weight in bright silver coins, and an ounce of gold was not unfrequently given for a bright-colored handkerchief. In a few months the means for the organization of a community were obtained from the gold-diggings. Nothing tends so much to elevate the lowly as the discovery of gold-washings, in which individual effort, and not machinery, is the ruling power, and the producer of wealth. But even a gold country has its evils; for nowhere have I ever seen so many disappointed men as at the very place where an abundance of gold could be had for simply washing it out of the mud; and nowhere have I seen so large a proportion of unemployed men as on the spot where the wages of labor were fabulously high. Still, with all these drawbacks, the city of Cortéz rapidly progressed under the stimulus of gold discoveries, until he found the wildest of his dreams falling short of the reality.
THE MONKS IN MEXICO.
The new city did not occupy the exact position of its Indian predecessor, but was clustered around the still remaining navigable canals, upon the southern border, while the main portion of the old city, which lay toward the northern limits of the island—where to this day such an abundant supply of earthen gods is to be found by digging—was left a mass of ruins. These were not, by any means, the ruins of fallen stone walls, or capitals, or columns, but shapeless masses of earth, which proclaim most unmistakably the kind of magnificence which distinguished the ancient capital of the Aztec empire.
The monks, who scented gold as buzzards scent carrion, began early to discover the growing wealth of this new city, and soon a party of a dozen Franciscans, in sackcloth with downcast visages, approached the city. They came, not as religious teachers, but as spiritual scavengers, who had consecrated their lives for gold to clean out the road to heaven for the vilest sinners. Cortéz, who had been the greatest sinner, was now the greatest penitent. The whole city was moved at the coming of these holy men, who carried the cross before them, but forgot not the cards and the dice in their pockets—who daily, in the mass, consecrated spiritual bread for famishing souls, and at night spent the wages of their piety at the gambling-table. To the surprise of his fellow-profligates, and to the astonishment of the Indians, Cortéz, walking bare-footed, led the procession that escorted the monks from near the spot where his brigantines had sailed among the corn-fields of Iztapalapan to the little chapel he had partly finished, and which now stands in the yard of the Franciscans.[50] ] He was so zealous in the performance of his devotions and his penances that he won the affections of the holy fathers to such a degree that he ever found faithful supporters in the powerful order of Saint Francis in all his troubles at the Spanish court. The question of his sincerity mattered little to them. It was the benefit of his public example which they, above all things, desired in their search after golden treasures. To get gold and to gratify their vices was their pious calling. Though they boast of having baptized some 6000 Indians, this argues nothing, except as it tends to show the numbers of the Indian population of the valley; for, as a badge of their subjugation, the Indians received Christian baptism; and truly it has been said of them, "They feared the Lord, but served their graven images."
We have now a sadder tale to tell; one that philanthropists have grieved over so often. Gold-washings are soon exhausted, but they frequently lead to the discovery of silver mines, which become so profitable as to drive away the very memory of the gold-washings. Thus the fact that gold-washings ever existed in Mexico, or even in Brazil, is almost forgotten, and the places where those washings were rests in vague tradition.
But while gold is procured by the most simple process, to extract silver requires science, and an immense expenditure of labor and machinery, in delving to the very bowels of the earth, and in separating the slight percentage of pure silver from the mass of ore. In this exhausting labor, which is often assigned to convicts, Indians were employed until they gave up the ghost. The conquerors had appropriated to themselves the best-looking of the Indian females, while their husbands—for Indians marry very early in life—were consigned to the mines as laborers and carriers in the bowels of the mountain. From this promiscuous intercourse, so early introduced, has arisen the present mixed-blood population of Mexico. The offspring of sin, they are a nation of sinners. The pure Indians are the descendants chiefly of the unenslaved tribes, like the Tlascalans and Tezcucans, who carried on the subsequent wars of Cortéz, and the whites are mostly descendants of later immigrations.