Our collection of material for an argument will be complete when I have added that the trees most prolific of artificial fruit die the earliest, and suffer most from running sores; that the vines cultivated artificially to produce the choicest wines suffer most from the mildew, and the potatoes of the most artificial varieties are the ones that have suffered most from the rot. When the cholera first visited Mexico, its passage through the country was like the ravages of the Angel of Death among the Meztizos and the fragments of decaying races. And this progress toward depopulation can not be stayed by the infusion of a vigorous stock. The law of sexuality in plants leads to the intermarriage of the vigorous with the decaying and the intermixture of blossoms; nor can human plants long vegetate together without intermarriages, which ingraft the vigorous constitutions with the virus of the old and decaying.
PROSPECTS OF MEXICO.
If, then, I have correctly enunciated the law of migration of men, animals, and plants, and if the law of intermixture of distinct races, or distinct species of the race, has been truly stated, the important argument to be drawn from it, which interests all Americans inquiring into the future of Mexico, is, that the present incongruous fragments of population which the internal disorders of Spain have set loose in Mexico can never be transformed into a homogeneous nationality, nor can sufficiently permanent elements of strength be found in this political chaos to constitute a permanent government. The degraded condition to which labor is reduced forbids the idea of an immigration of foreign laborers, while the miserable scale of wages—a quarter of a dollar a day upon the estates, payable out of the plantation store, or three shillings in the towns—holds out no inducement for poor men of a healthy race to abandon their own country and migrate to Mexico in sufficient numbers to form a substratum of society which ultimately might rise into a nationality.
A still more important question is disposed of by the facts stated in this chapter, viz., that there is no possibility of the present inhabitants of Mexico ever successfully driving back the Apaches and reconquering the northern provinces. Her title to the wild regions of the north, which rests on discovery and colonization, is lost by her utter inability to subdue the Indians and to colonize, after a probation of three hundred years. At this day the whole of the northern provinces lie, like waifs, open to any civilized people to take possession who require an additional territory. But nothing is so absurd as the American process of acquisition by treaty of territories which already are, or soon will be, covered all over by immense land-claims, in districts subjugated by the Indians, instead of acknowledging the title of the Apaches to the lands they have conquered from Mexico, and long held in possession, and purchasing of those who are the real sovereigns of Northern Mexico.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
The Church of Mexico.—Its present Condition and Power.—The Number of the "Religios."—The Wealth of the Church.—The Money-power of the Church.—The Power of Assassination.—Educating the People robs the Priest.—Making and adoring Images.—The Progress downward.
The Catholic Church of Mexico is a peculiar institution. Its historical antecedents have been considered in previous chapters in connection with other subjects. Men no longer whisper their unbelief with trembling, nor have they any longer to dread inquisitorial fires if they refuse to pay tithes to the bishop, or if they neglect to bestow rich gifts upon the priests. Still the Church survives the losses of this important engine of piety, and continues unmodified by passing events. In the midst of revolutions it stands unchanged, a relic of the last century. It stands like a great showman's wagon from which the horses have been detached, and children, great and small, are collected around to look at its images. Unfortunately, there is an abundance of full-grown children in a country where, for centuries, a combination of spiritual and temporal despotisms have dwarfed the intellects of men down to the standard of a toy-shop religion, which had long rejoiced in crushing the human intellect, while it disdained to enlighten the humblest understanding.
MEXICAN PRIESTS TRAVELING.