The señor by whom I had the honor of being introduced to the Congress, I afterward had the pleasure of meeting more intimately in his law office, Señor Don Licénciado Vicente Garcia, Senator, Judge, Counselor of State, and Lawyer profoundly versed in the curious learning of Spanish-Mexican law. He is a gentleman of the Old School, a cultivated Mexican of that small class among whom have been continuously preserved scholarship and learning, since the earliest advent of the few Doctors of the Law, who accompanied the first Viceroys to New Spain. Men ripe in mediæval scholarship, apart from the teachings and doctrines of the Canon Law, they have always formed a distinct class in Mexico, even as in Old Spain, and have jealously cherished that seed of intellectual independence from which has successfully developed the opposition of the State to the incessant and covert encroachment of the Roman Church.
In Señor Garcia’s library of well stored shelves I noted many curious and ancient vellum-leaved tomes, containing some of the earliest printed codes of Mexican law, as well as treatises in French upon the Napoleonic Code, and there were some few decisions, in French, of the Courts of Louisiana. There was also a Blackstone in English and a few newly bound law treatises in that tongue,—volumes belonging to his son, he said, who was taking a special course in English in the University of the State.
A VISTA IN MORELIA
Don Licénciado Garcia is a short-set man with whitening hair and gray moustache and intellectual face. You at once know him to be the student and the scholar, although with dark glasses screening his eyes, he pathetically informed us that he was fast growing blind. Indeed, he can no longer see to write or read, but employs a reader and trusts to his son for all correspondence, thus conducting his large practice with eyes and hands other than his own. We found him a busy man, for in Mexico the courts are perpetually in session, and a case once on the docket is liable to be called at any time.
There are many such men in the Mexican Republic as Señor Garcia, and to them must really be credited much of the conservative disposition of the government. They are the conservators of scholarly liberalism, and form a community of intelligence and learning upon whom President Diaz can always rely to give assistance and direction in sustaining and preserving the stability of the Republic.
Morelia is a city older than any city of the United States. Its streets were paved before Boston was out of the swamps, and before Richmond was thought of. All Mexican cities are paved, every street, every alley. A great aqueduct, built on immense arches, brings an abundant supply of sweet, fresh water. There are many beautiful parks in these Mexican cities, all kept in perfect order at municipal expense. In them, flowering shrubs, roses, geraniums and heliotropes, grown to veritable trees, are ever in bloom; there are orange and lemon, pomegranate and fig, palm and banana trees; there are statues and flowing fountains, and great carved stone seats, all free to the people.
There is plenty of flowing water on these high tablelands, and already its power, harnessed to the turbine and dynamo, is giving the people free electric lights. The Mexican towns and the city governments are run for the benefit of the people. There are no monopolies. If President Diaz hears that a mayor, a city council, or a Congress is not running things as he judges they should, he just hints to the gentleman to resign. If he does not comply, a polite invitation requests him to come to the Capital and dine with the President. If he is not hungry and fails to come, then a few soldiers (numbering in one case a small army), come down and politely escort the gentleman to the dinner. He may be shot, he may be permitted to live quietly somewhere in the President’s city with a soldier for a life companion,—but he never goes home. An Ex-governor of the State of Guerrero has been living in Mexico City, with a soldier for a chum, these twenty years!
THE CATHEDRAL—MORELIA