Mexico | Page 8

at close grips with his outraged people, for he had broken all his promises to them. Hurrying across the country to embark and claim the imperial crown of Germany, vacant by the death of his grandfather Maximilian, eager for the large sums of money he needed for his purpose, which Spain of all his realms alone could provide, the sovereign was trampling upon the dearly prized charters of his people. The great rising of the Castilian commoners was finally crushed, thanks to class dissensions and the diplomacy of the sovereign. Thenceforward the revenues of Castile were at the mercy of the Emperor, whose needs for his world-wide responsibilities were insatiable; and the Indies of the West, being the appanage of the crown of Castile, were drained to uphold the claim of Spain and its Emperor-King to dictate to Christendom the form and doctrines of its religious faith. It is no wonder, therefore, that the despatches of the obscure adventurer who announced to his sovereign that, in spite of obstacles thrown in his way by highly placed royal officials, he had conquered a vast civilised empire with a mere handful of followers, were received sympathetically by the potentate to whom the possession of fresh sources of revenue was so important. Cortes in his various letters again and again claims the Emperor's patronage of his bold defiance of the Emperor's officers on the ground that the latter in their action were moved solely by considerations of their personal gain, whereas he, Cortes, was striving to endow his sovereign with a rich new empire and boundless treasure whilst carrying into the dark pagan land, at the sword's point, the gentle creed of the Christian God.
Of this religious element of his expedition Cortes never lost sight; he was licentious in his life, unscrupulous in his methods, and regardless of the suffering he inflicted to attain his ends; but in this he was only a son of his country and his time; such qualities might, and in fact did, accompany the most devout personal piety and an exalted religious ideal. That the imposition of Christian civilisation upon Mexico meant the sacrifice in cold blood of countless thousands of inoffensive human creatures was as nothing when once the legal forms had been complied with and the people could be assumed to be recalcitrant or rebellious to a decree of which they understood not a word. The awful holocaust of natives which followed the Spanish advance, the enslavement of a whole people to the demon of greed, especially after the withdrawal of Cortes from the scene, left a bitter crop of estrangement between the native Mexicans and their white masters, of which the rank remains have not even yet been quite eradicated. Cortes himself, as great in diplomacy as in war, it is true made himself rich beyond dreams, though he was defrauded of his deserts, even as Columbus, Balboa, and Pizarro were; but he was not wantonly cruel, and in the circumstances in which he was placed it was difficult for him to have acted very differently from what he did. It was not until the smaller men displaced him and came to enrich themselves at any cost that his methods were debased and degraded to vile ends and the policy itself was rendered hateful.
Thus, whilst New Spain was always held to be nearer to the mother country than any other American lands and more of a white man's home than the settlements on the Southern Continent, the distrust engendered by the ruthless cruelty of the earlier years of the occupation contributed powerfully to retard any intimate intermixture of the conquerors and the conquered races, the closer connection with Spain also keeping the Spanish-Mexican decidedly more pure in blood than any other Spanish American people. This will account for the fact that the various Indian races of Mexico are still, to a large extent, distinct from each other and from the pure white Mexicans after nearly a century of native Republican government. In the State of Oaxaca alone there are even now at least fifteen perfectly distinguishable separate tribes of pure Indians, of which two, the Zapotecas and the Mistecas, comprise more than half the whole population of the State. But, this notwithstanding, no race question now really exists in Mexico. The pure-blooded Indians frequently occupy the highest positions in the State, as judges, soldiers, or savants, the greatest but one of Mexican Presidents, Juarez, having been a full-blooded Zapoteca, whilst the present ruler of Mexico, certainly one of the most exalted figures in American history, General Porfirio Diaz, is justifiably prouder of his Misteca descent than of the white ancestry he also claims. Nor, as in other countries of similar ethnological constitution, does the Indian population here tend to decrease. The Mexican Indian or half-breed