Mexico and its Religion Part 19

Earthquakes are, and ever have been, very frequent through the whole of Mexico. Yet they have never been very severe, particularly at the city, as is demonstrated by the very existence of a city upon such a ma.s.s of soft earth as I have shown in a former chapter const.i.tutes the foundation of Mexico. A reasonable amount of hard shaking would dislocate its muddy basis and engulf the city. Now and then some unusually frail structure is toppled down, and the church steeples are swayed a little this way or that, but the cement that sustains them has heretofore proved sufficiently cohesive to save them from being shaken to pieces or tumbled down.[60] Some ten years ago, the convent church, in which was the miraculous image of our Saviour, was thrown down, and the image that had annually poured forth its precious blood for the healing of the spiritual and temporal maladies of all pious believers was buried under the ruins. But this calamity was only a precursor of a greater miracle; for, on removing the rubbish, the sacred image was found intact, and as ready as ever to bleed again to order for ready pay. The spiritual interpretation of this astounding phenomenon was, that the devil, in his malice, had attempted, as of old, to crush the miraculous power of the Saviour; and now, again, as upon the high mountain, he was foiled, and the flow of blood was not intermitted.

IGNORANCE AND MIRACLES.

Miracles have ever been the most fruitful source of profit that the Church enjoys, for at the annunciation of every new miracle the faithful are quickened to devotion and to contributions, which, above all things, is to be desired by the "impoverished Church" of Mexico.[61]

An earthquake is always a windfall or a G.o.dsend to the priesthood. An outsider is often surprised at the number of miracles that, in old times, were connected with earthquakes. But rarely do we hear of modern miracles. The spirit of miracles works only in times of most profound ignorance; and experience has convinced the Church that the only prospect of the continuation of miraculous visitations of the holy Apostles and of the Virgin in Mexico, depends upon the continuation of the people in the most profound ignorance, and in childlike obedience to their spiritual superiors. So long as this state of things continued, the holy Virgin was ever present among them, performing the most astounding cures, and even, upon one occasion, causing the ground to open and swallow up the surplus waters of the valley, to the relief of the "most devout people of Mexico," besides performing other astounding miracles, that have been duly attested by Pope, prelates, and the Council of Rites. But now, since the education of the common people has been attempted, although on a very limited scale, and men are allowed to speak openly, the most holy Virgin of Guadalupe has withdrawn her wonder-working power from an unbelieving people, while the blind, the halt, the lame, the palsied, and the diseased crowd around her shrine, not to obtain her healing mercy, but to solicit charity. The saints, also, have ceased to stir up the elements, so that volcanic fires have ceased throughout the whole limits of the republic, and earthquakes have almost forgotten to perform their annual duty of shaking the earth.

The last volcanic eruption in Mexico was one of the most astounding of which the record has come down to us, whether in Mexico or in any other country. Fortunately, we have reliable evidence in relation to this event, for Humboldt not only surveyed the volcano as it appeared in his day, but, from eye-witnesses of the first eruption, learned the incidents that fill out the history, and also the miraculous cause which is a.s.signed for this mighty convulsion of nature. His story I shall follow in preference to the popular tradition of the awful consequences that succeeded the curse p.r.o.nounced by two Capuchin friars upon the estate of Jorullo.

Just one hundred years ago, which was fifty years before the time of the visit of Humboldt, two Capuchin friars came to preach at the estate which occupied the beautiful valley of Jorullo. This valley was situated between two basaltic ridges, and was watered by two small streams of limpid water, the San Pedro and the Cuitamba. These small parallel rivers furnished an abundant supply of water, which was well employed in irrigating flourishing sugar and indigo plantations. These Capuchins, not having met with a favorable reception at the estate of San Pedro, poured out the most horrible imprecations against the beautiful and fertile plains, foretelling that, as the first consequences of their curse, the plantation would be swallowed up by flames rising out of the earth, and that afterward the neighboring mountains would forever remain covered with snow and ice. After denouncing the curse, the two holy men went on their way.

ERUPTION OF JORULLO.

On the night of the 28th and 29th of September, 1759, horrible subterraneous noises were heard, which had been preceded by slight shocks of an earthquake since the June preceding. The affrighted Indians fled to the Aquasareo, and soon thereafter a tract of land twelve miles square, which now goes by the name of the "evil land"

(_mal pais_), rose up in the form of a bladder, and boiled, and seethed, and bubbled like a caldron of pudding, shooting up columns of fire from ten thousand orifices. Sometimes a number of orifices would unite into one vast crater, and vomit forth such a column of fire as was never before seen by human eyes since the time when "the smoke of the country went up as the smoke of a furnace."

Intelligent witnesses a.s.sured Humboldt that flames were seen to issue forth, which, from a surface of more than a mile square, cast up fragments of burning rock to a prodigious height. The two small rivers were swallowed up, and their decomposed waters added fuel to the flames, which burned for many months with a fierceness that is indescribable.

Such is the origin of the volcano of Jorullo, in the State of Michoican, and such is the pretended consequence of a curse p.r.o.nounced by Capuchin monks upon one of the most beautiful estates in the country; and for generations since, the dread of incurring the displeasure of strolling vagabond monks has rested like a blight upon the common people; and yet this is but one of the thousand ways by which the Mexican priesthood play upon the credulity of the ignorant in a country where convulsions of nature are matters of almost ordinary occurrence. Every extraordinary event in nature is ascribed to the exercise of supernatural power on the part of the clergy or the most holy images of the Church.

The fires of Jorullo have ceased to burn for half a century. The central crater that was eventually formed, and the numerous little orifices of fire, have long since become cold, and all the evidences of an active fire have pa.s.sed away. But to this day the Indians watch the progress of the cooling process; as they antic.i.p.ate that, before many years have pa.s.sed, the unfulfilled portion of the curse will be realized, and that those now live who will see the surrounding mountains covered by perpetual snow--an evil which the half-clad Indians of the tropics appear to dread more than perpetual fire.

The last and only enumeration of the inhabitants of Mexico or New Spain was made in 1794, by that distinguished Vice-king to whom I have so often referred, Ravillagigedo. This enumeration gave as the actual population 3,865,529, besides the departments of Vera Cruz, Guanajuato, and Cohahuila, which were estimated to contain 518,000 more, making a sum total of 4,412,529. Since that time there has been a great deal of extensive guessing, until by this simple process the population was brought up to 7,661,520, in 1853.[62] The process by which this increase is effected is to add one sixth for supposed omissions in the census, and a like number for supposed increase in the subsequent fifteen years till the breaking out of war, and taking for granted that the population has not retrograded during forty-five years of intermittent war. Such conclusions are made in violation of all the laws of population.

POPULATION OF MEXICO.

It may not be uninteresting to my readers to run over the laws which regulate the decrease of population, although it is too much our custom to look only at the other side of the picture. The social and civil wars of Mexico have been of such a character, as we have seen, as to warrant the belief that from this cause alone population must have constantly diminished, from their very commencement in 1810 until 1840, when matters were comparatively resuscitated. The employment for labor during the time that the large estates were neglected, and while the ca.n.a.ls of irrigation and the silver mines were in ruins, was of the most limited character; and the very indigent circ.u.mstances to which it reduced the majority of those who ranked above the _leperos_ must also have diminished the population of the republic much below that of the vice-kingdom under Ravillagigedo.

Since 1840, notwithstanding the frequent wars, Mexico, in favored localities, may have slightly increased in population; but this increase is more than balanced by the Indian wars of the northern departments, which have depopulated large tracts of country, sometimes extending across one tier of states even into the heart of Durango and Guanajuato; so that I hazard nothing in affirming that the population of the whole country must be less to-day than it was in 1794, notwithstanding that Humboldt sets down an estimate of 5,800,000 for the year 1803, and 6,500,000 for the year 1808. I might go farther, and affirm that the constant insecurity of life and property in all but the central parts of the republic is such as to keep down the natural increase of a population never prolific, being made up of a combination of uncongenial races--whites and Indians, whose intermixture leads to sterility.

The census shows two fifths of the population to be pure Indians, mostly laborers: this cla.s.s 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 cla.s.ses, which would tend to increase the number of this cla.s.s. 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 circ.u.mstances, 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, const.i.tute 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s 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 a.s.signed 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 const.i.tution. 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 G.o.d, 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 lat.i.tudes, 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 G.o.d 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.

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 pa.s.sage 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 s.e.xuality 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 const.i.tutions 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 h.o.m.ogeneous nationality, nor can sufficiently permanent elements of strength be found in this political chaos to const.i.tute 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 t.i.tle 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 t.i.tle 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.

[60] An attempt was made to explain away the story of Cortez getting drowned out at Iztapalapan, a point above the level of the city of Mexico, by suggesting that _perhaps_ an earthquake may have changed the face of the valley. But, unfortunately, Iztapalapan was the southern support of the old Indian levee (_calzado_), built to keep the water off of the city of Mexico in seasons of heavy rains.

[61] Though the richest ecclesiastical quasi-corporation in the world, your ears are constantly saluted with solicitations for contributions to the impoverished Church.

[62] _Colleccion de Leyes_, p. 184.

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 a.s.sa.s.sination.--Educating the People robs the Priest.--Making and adoring Images.--The Progress downward.

The Catholic Church of Mexico is a peculiar inst.i.tution. 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 t.i.thes 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 pa.s.sing 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MEXICAN PRIESTS TRAVELING.]

Mexico is the only Catholic country in which the Church has remained unchanged during all the revolutions of the last half century. The French infidel armies, and the wars and revolutions that followed the French invasions, overturned the Church of Spain and Italy, so that the Church organization that now exists in those peninsulas is a new creation. Not so in Mexico. Its revolution was for the purpose of saving the privileges of the Church from the too sweeping reforms of the Cortes of Spain. And there it now stands, with all the properties and annuities which it enjoyed in the time of the idiot kings. The Inquisition no longer enforces with fire the censures of the Church, and men are no longer compelled by legal process to pay t.i.thes. But for these losses the Church has received a heavy compensation. The priests and inquisitors who ruled the childish court of Spain would allow no independence to the Mexican Church, but supplied, by royal appointment, all the candidates for vacant bishoprics and chapters, while the Vice-king was allowed to fill the inferior offices of the Church.

By the partial separation of Church and state which took place in 1833, the Church of Mexico became independent of the state. The chapters acquired the right of electing their own bishops; the bishops, by virtue of their spiritual authority, appointing the priests and exercising control over all Church property as _quasi_ corporations-sole, at least over all property not vested in religious communities, if practically there could be said to be any real exception. What that newly-acquired power of the Mexican bishops amounts to, we in the United States, from our own experience of the same authority, can judge.

STATISTICS OF THE CHURCH.

That the reader may know how extensive is this money-power of the bishops, I subjoin an extract from a statistical chart[63] published by Senor _Lerdo de Tejado_, _First Official de Ministerio de Fomento_, the following synopsis of the clergy and their incomes:

"There is one archbishop, the Archbishop of Mexico, and eleven bishops, and one to be created at Vera Cruz. There are 184 prebends and 1229 parishes. The total number of ecclesiastics is 3223.[64] There are 146 convents of monks and 59 convents of nuns, and 8 colleges for propagating the faith. The convents of monks are inhabited by 1139 persons, and there are 1541 nuns in convents, and with them 740 young girls and 870 servants. There are 238 persons in the colleges for propagating the faith." This is less than half the number of the _religios_ under the vice-kings, while the riches of the Church have immensely increased, as we shall presently see.

REVENUE OF THE CHURCH.

I translate from the same author, in a note, statistics upon the much-agitated question of the wealth of the Church of Mexico,[65] from which it will be seen that the total amount consumed in the maintenance of these 3223 persons, is annually $20,000,000, besides the very large sums expended in the repairs and ornaments of an enormous number of churches, and in gifts at the shrines of the different images, which can not be appropriated to the maintenance of the clergy. This sum of $20,000,000, if fairly divided among them, would yield an abundant support, though not an extravagant living; but, unfortunately, the greatest portion of this immense sum is absorbed by the bishops, while the priests of the villages contrive to exist by the contributions they wring out of the _peons_. At the time of the census, 1793, the twelve bishops had $539,000[66] appropriated to their support; but now their revenues are so mixed up with the revenues of the Church, that it is impossible to say how much these twelve successors of the apostles appropriate to their own support.