The census shows two fifths of the population to be pure Indians, mostly laborers: this class would have been the one most likely to have increased since the Revolution, had there remained the same amount of employment and wages as formerly. In consequence of the abolition of monopolies, the articles necessary for the comforts of life became much cheaper and more easy of attainment to the laboring classes, which would tend to increase the number of this class. These Indians, moreover, had remained to a great extent free from the deleterious intermixture of white blood. But the pure Indian, compared with the pure Caucasian, is a race, under the most favorable circumstances, of slow increase. The diseases hereditary among the Indians are aggravated by promiscuous marriages, so that in California the missionaries used to inquire diligently after a man's family connections, and compel a convert to marry into his own clan, or not marry at all.
The Meztizos, or mixed races, constitute another two fifths of the population. This is a less vigorous race than the pure Indian. They are all the children of sin, mostly the offspring of illicit intercourse, and are for this cause a feebler race than the offspring of the same mixture where the man was only blessed with a single wife. As all marriage of whites with Indians in New Spain was unlawful, these Meztizos bore the same relation to the law in New Spain which the mulattoes do in our Southern States.
RACES IN MEXICO.
The whites were set down at one million, or about one fifth of the whole population, at the most prosperous period of the vice-kingdom. I doubt if they now amount to half or even a quarter of that number, and of this population there is a very vigorous French immigration, now amounting to five or six thousand, and about as many Germans, a handful of English, and still less Americans. The native white population does not possess the physical energy requisite for rapid increase. They form no portion of the laboring people; they live in effeminacy, and their children are not nursed at the healthy breasts of athletic negresses, as are the children of our Southern planters, but are suckled by a more enervated race than themselves, viz., the Meztizos. The emigration from Spain was never an emigration of laboring men. It consisted almost entirely of priests, stewards, clerks, and taskmasters, to whom labor was considered as degrading. When the Spaniards lost a monopoly of these employments, and sank to the level of the native races, their numbers rapidly declined. The slight foreign immigration above mentioned is not one of laborers, for labor is considered an unbecoming employment at Mexico for white men, but an immigration of tradesmen and shop-keepers, who add nothing to the material wealth of the country.
Of the Mexican Negro race I never knew but two, and one of them held the post of captain in the army, and the other was the naked alcalde, mentioned in a former chapter, who was discharging the functions of "Judge of First Instance." The reasons assigned for the disappearance of this race from Mexico after so large an importation of slaves as that which took place in the last century is the incongeniality of the climate of Mexico, particularly of the table-lands, to the negro constitution. At the breaking out of the Mexican revolution, almost the only negro slaves in the country were in the department of Vera Cruz. The sugar-planters of the hot country of the interior, finding it impossible to carry on their estates by the use of negro slaves, attempted to reduce the mortality among their working people by raising up a race of those disgusting-looking beings called Zambos, a cross of negroes and Indians; but it was attended with the usual ill success that has followed every attempt to cross or intermingle different and distinct races of men, animals, or even plants.
INTERMIXTURE OF RACES.
The advantages arising from transplanting the human race, as well as vegetables and plants, are manifestly great. But transplanting should never be confounded with intermixing races, whether they be human, or of the lower animals, or of plants. When God, in his infinite wisdom, saw fit to choose out a family that he destined to continue for thousands of years, He transplanted it into a new soil and climate, and subjected it to divers migrations. First it went down into Egypt, and then, "with a high hand and an outstretched arm," He brought it up out of Egypt, and after a sojourn of forty years in the wilderness, He re-established it in the land of Canaan. This is the origin of the most perfectly developed race of the present time. Whether in the tropics or in the most northern latitudes, the Jew is the same intellectual and physical man, and carries about with him the indelible marks of a descendant of those patriarchs who were commanded not to intermarry with the people among whom they dwelt. The Jew may wander and sojourn in strange lands, but he cherishes with national pride the blood of Abraham, which he insists still flows in his veins, and he is most careful, of all things, to transmit it pure to his children. Though Canaan abounded with fragments of nationalities, his boast is that his blood is not intermixed with any of them. To the history of the Jews we might add the experience of the Franciscan missionaries of California, that for a healthy offspring a man must marry among his own clan.
The constant complaints we hear of the deterioration of imported animals of choice breeds is the result of a disregard of this law of propagation. The importations of Merino sheep, and afterward of the Saxon, proved a failure chiefly from this cause. Those engaged in the importation of English cattle begin already to make the same complaint, which they would not have done had they taken the precaution to import their foreign stock in families. The Mulatto is an apparent, not a real exception to the rule. He is superior to the Negro, often superior to his white father; but it is a superiority for a generation only, and carries with it the seeds of its own dissolution. The mule is superior to the donkey, but lasts only for a generation. The Oregon ox, a cross between the Spanish and American breeds, is superior to either of the pure breeds. But it is the concentration in one animal of what might be the material of divers generations.
I once asked a Dutchess county farmer the cause of the great superiority of his crops of wheat over those of his neighbors, and his reply was that he always brought his seed from a distance, changed it often, and took good care not to let it intermix with the wheat of that region. The same, or, rather, greater results have attended the transportation of American seeds and plants to California, where a new soil and a new climate has produced upon all the staples of agriculture such an improvement as to astonish men who have made this branch of industry a study. It is the result of the migration of plants where there are no plants of the same character to intermix, and so deteriorate the race by crossing the breed. In trees the same law holds unchangeably. We produce fine fruit by inoculation and by grafting; but experience has taught us never to inoculate upon a grafted stem, but always upon a natural branch. As the Conquistadors selected the best-looking Indian women for the mothers of the Meztizos, so the fruit-raiser selects the best natural stems to inoculate with his artificial varieties of fruit. In this way we get better fruit by exhausting the root, and a whole race of plants are sometimes worn out by mixture from too close a proximity of the different families of the same genus. In the laws which Moses gave to the children of Israel, we find a provision against the evils of intermixtures in the precept: "Thy cattle shall not gender with diverse kind." "Thou shalt not sow the field with, divers seeds." In these precepts God has taken care to guard the wholesome generation of plants as well as of animals.
The successful intermingling of the Protestant Anglo-Saxon immigration with our own people in the second and third generations is not an exception to the law of generation, as both are but branches of the same stock, and are successfully planted together. Nor is the mortality which follows the Catholic immigration an exception to the beneficial law of migration, for habits of intemperance account for the short lives of these immigrants; and though their offspring is abundant, yet it is all tainted with an inheritance of disease, and too many of the children suffer the ruinous consequences of having drawn "still slops" from a mother's breast in infancy. For physically, and in the chain of generation, most truly are the sins of the fathers visited upon the children to the third and fourth generation.