If the legislation of Queen Isabella and the Emperor Charles V. appears to favour the Indians with regard to imposts, it has deprived them, on the other hand, of the most important rights enjoyed by the other citizens. In an age when it was formally discussed if the Indians were rational beings, it was conceived granting them a benefit to treat them like minors, to put them under the perpetual tutory of the whites, and to declare null every act signed by a native of the a native of the copper-coloured race, and every obligation which he contracted beyond the value of 15 francs. These laws are maintained in full vigour; and they place insurmountable barriers between the Indians and the other casts, with whom all intercourse is almost prohibited. Thousands of inhabitants can enter into no contract which is binding (no pueden tratar y contratar); and condemned to a perpetual minority, they become a charge to themselves and the state in which they live. I cannot better

weighed in the balance with the immensity of the benefits imported by the catholic arms into these provinces? "El feliz tiempo," exclaims the reverend Father Gumila, “ para tantos millones de Indios, como yá, por la Bondad de Dios, se han salvado, y salvan (aunque infeliz para los que aun estan en su ciega ignorancia, o ciegamente resisten a la luz evangelica) empezò desde que las armas catholicas tomaron possession de las principales provincias de aquellos dos vastos imperios, y prosiegue hasta ahora, creciendo siempre en todos angulos del Nuevo mundo la luz de la Santa Fe, para eterna dicha de aquellos infelices hijos d'Adan (vol i. p. 74.) Trans.

finish the political view of the Indians of New Spain than by laying before the reader an extract from a memoir presented by the bishop and chapter of Mechoacan* to the king, in 1799, which breathes the wisest views and the most liberal ideas.

This respectable bishopt, whom I had the advantage of knowing personally, and who terminated his useful and laborious life at the advanced age of 80, represents to the monarch, that in the actual state of things the moral improvement of the Indian is impossible, if the obstacles are not removed which oppose the progress of national industry. He confirms the principles which he

*Informe del Obispo y Cabildo eclesiastico de Valladolid de Mechoacan al Rey sobre Jurisdiccion y Ymunidades del Clero Americano. This report, which I possess in manuscript, containing more than 10 sheets, was drawn up on the occasion of the famous Cedula real of the 25th October 1795, which permitted the secular judge to try the delittos enormes of the clergy. The Sala del crimen, persuaded of their right, treated the priests with severity, and cast them into the same prisons with the lowest classes of the people. In this struggle, the audiencia ranged themselves on the side of the clergy. Disputes of jurisdiction are very common in distant countries. They are pursued with so much the greater keenness, as the European policy from the first discovery of the new world. has always considered the disunion of casts, of families, and constituted authorities, the surest means of preserving the colonies in a dependence on the mother country.

+ Fray Antonio de San Miguel, monk of St. Jerome de Corvan, native of the Montañas de Santander.

lays down by several pa sages from the works of Montesquieu and Bernardin de St. Pierre. These citations can hardly fail to surprise us from the pen of a prelate belonging to the regular clergy, who passed a part of his life in convents, and who filled an episcopal chair on the shores of the South Sea. "The population of New Spain," says the bishop towards the end of his memoir, "is composed of three classes of men, whites or Spaniards, Indians, and castes. I suppose the Spaniards to compose the tenth part of the whole mass. In their hands almost all the property and all the wealth of the kingdom are centered. The Indians and the castes cultivate the soil; they are in the service of the better sort of people; and they live by the work of their hands. Hence there results between the Indians and the whites that opposition of interests, and that mutual hatred, which universally takes place between those who possess all and those who possess nothing, between masters and those who live in servitude. Thus we see, on the one hand, the effects of envy and discord, deception, theft, and the inclination to prejudice the interests of the rich; and on the other, arrogance, severity, and the desire of taking every moment advantage of the helplessness of the Indian. I am not ignorant that these evils every where spring from a great inequality of condition. But in America they are rendered still more terrific, because there exists no

intermediate state: we are rich or miserable, noble or degraded by the laws or the force of opinion (infame de derecho y hecho.)

"In fact, the Indians and the races of mixed blood (castas) are in a state of extreme humiliation. The colour peculiar to the Indians, their ignorance, and especially their poverty, remove them to an infinite distance from the whites, who occupy the first rank in the population of New Spain. The privileges which the laws seem to concede to the Indians are of small advantage to them, perhaps they are rather hurtful. Shut up in a narrow space of 600 varas (500 metres *) of radius, assigned by an ancient law to the Indian villages, the natives may be said to have no individual property, and are bound to cultivate the common property (bienes de communidad). This cultivation is a load so much the more insupportable to them, as they have now for several years back lost all hope of ever being able to enjoy the fruit of their labour. The new arrangement of intendancies bears, that the natives can receive no assistance from the funds of the communalty without a special permission of the Board of Finances of Mexico (junta superior de la Real Hacienda”). (The communal property has been farmed out by the intendants; and the produce of the labour of the natives is poured into the royal treasury, where

the officiales reales keep an account, under special heads, of what they call the property of each village. I say what they call the property, for this property is nothing more than a fiction for these last twenty years. The intendant even cannot dispose of it in favour of the natives, who are wearied of demanding assistance from the communalty funds. The junta de Real Hacienda demands informes from the fiscal and the asesor of the viceroy. Whole years pass in accumulating documents, but the Indians remain without any answer. The money of the caras de communidades is so habitually considered as having no fixed destination, that the intendant of Valladolid sent in 1798 more than a million of francs* to Madrid, which had been accumulating for twelve years. The king was told that it was a gratuitous and patriotic gift from the Indians of Mechoacan to the sovereign, to aid in the prosecution of the war against England!)

"The law prohibits the mixture of casts; it prohibits the whites from taking up their residence in Indian villages; and it prevents the natives from establishing themselves among the Spaniards. This state of insulation opposes obstacles to civil ization. The Indians are governed by themselves; all their subaltern magistrates are of the coppercoloured race. In every village we find eight or

* 41,6701. sterling. Trans.