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Those who were whipped were obligated afterward to kiss the hand of the person who whipped them.
In speaking of the ecclesiastical influence in the land and of the moral situation of this privileged class, it is impossible not to collide with interests sustained by superstition and created by despotism. The principle of national sovereignty, recognized subsequently in those lands, might have uprooted prejudices destructive of liberty and made presumptions to blind obedience disappear if the declarations of abstract doctrines alone, even the most solemn, were sufficient. The force of habits created for three centuries will still remain an obstacle, so that at mid-century, enlightenment and philosophy have to triumph over this colossus after a terrible and hard battle. In those lands, the persons of the bishops were, without hyperbole, as reverenced as the person of the great Lama among the Tatars. When he went out into the street, the Indians knelt down and bowed their heads to receive his blessing. The friars in the towns and small villages distant from the capitals were the teachers of doctrine and the masters of common lands, in the large cities, directors of the conscience of landowners and women. The convents of the Dominicans and the Carmelites possessed and possess riches of great importance in rural and urban real estate. The convents of the religious in Mexico, especially the Conception, the Incarnation, and Saint Theresa, possess in property at least three quarters of the individual buildings of the capital, and the same happens proportionally in the other provinces. So one can be assured without exaggeration that the wealth that the clergymen and religious of both sexes possess amounts to the annual proceeds of three million in income. Put this revenue in the weight of the balance with respect to their influence, and one is able to calculate approximately what it will be among a poor population where properties are very badly distributed.
Now I enter into another delicate subject that can be considered one of the elements of discord in those countries and that will offer great obstacles to their legislators, depending on the degree to which they abandon infantile and frivolous questions and concern themselves more deeply with the true interests of their patria. I speak of the distribution of lands that the Spaniards made and the way those lands are divided today.
The Spanish government had to make concessions of lands to those persons who had contributed most to the conquest of that rich and beautiful
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territory. Naturally, the conquerors selected the best situated and most fertile plots of land in the order in which each one was believed to have the right or did have the right to receive this kind of compensation. The rich and considerable possessions of the Counts del Valle, de Santiago, San Miguel de Aguayo, the Marshall de Castilla, the Duke of Monteleone, and others occupy an immense and arable territory. The other rural farms that surround the towns and cities, which belong to the convents and pious establishments, have their source in royal concessions, others in testamentary bequests, gifts inter vivos, and some few come from contracts of purchase and sale. The third class of large landowners is that of families descended from rich Spaniards who bought, in distant times, lands from the government or from Indians when they had an extremely low price, and they were successively augmented until they formed haciendas that today are worth from a half-million pesos to two million, like those of the Reglas, Vivancos, Vicarios, Marquess del Jaral, Fagoagas, Alcaraces, and others. The fourth class is that of small landowners, who have rural farms whose value is not more than between six and fifteen thousand pesos, acquired by purchase or inheritance or other similar title. Here is how the greater part of the lands of the Mexican Republic were distributed, especially those that surround cities or great population centers. All these possessions are in the hands of Spaniards or their descendants and are cultivated by Indians who serve as day workers. Of the seven million inhabitants that will now occupy that immense territory, at least four are Indians or people of color, among whom nine-tenths are reduced to the state I have discussed before. Consequently, there does not exist in that land that gradation of fortunes that constitutes a common scale of comforts in social life, principle and foundation of the existence of civilized nations. It is an image of feudal Europe without the spirit of independence and the energetic force of those times.
During the three hundred years of colonial government, these classes, reduced to subsisting on their daily labor, had no notions whatsoever of a better condition of life, or at least did not even suspect they could be called to enter into the pleasures of any other kind of existence than the sad and mean one in which they remained. Their desires, on the other hand, were proportionate to their ideas, and these, as has been said, occupied a sphere so small that one could say with accuracy that they knew only the physical side of life. Those activities that put them
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in contact with white people, such as attendance at church and few, very rare, gatherings for some public act, were purely mechanical, and it was a phenomenon to hear a reasoned statement from the mouths of those degraded beings. Many travelers have said that the indigenous peoples of America are reserved and silent, mistaking what is only the effect of their ignorance for contemplation or not caring to speak. But if by some unknown caprice of nature a genius stood out, a notable character, at the moment he spoke to his companions with the language of desperation and, exhorting them to throw off their enslavement, he was sacrificed by the oppressors. Tupac-Amaro in Peru and Quisteil in Yucatán can be cited, among others.
“The equality or inequality among the different orders of citizens in a new and semisavage nation,” says a famous writer, “depends essentially on the distribution of territorial property; because a nation that is not civilized does not have commerce, or accumulated capital, or manufacturing and arts; it cannot then possess other riches than those the earth produces. The earth is the only one that feeds men in a land without commerce and without accumulated riches, and men consistently obey the one who can, at his will, give them or take from them the means of living and enjoying. A nation,” continues the same author,
sometimes without revolution and without conquest, acquires an imperfect degree of civilization, where lands are cultivated but commerce and the arts have not yet made any progress at all: then it is probable that the lands belonging to this nation were, at its beginning, divided among the citizens in more or less equal portions, or at least that none of them obtained from their compatriots permission to appropriate an amount of land extremely disproportionate to the abilities of the family to cultivate it. The haciendas can be more or less large, but never were they like provinces, and the inequality that existed in this case among individuals would not be such that it might place some necessarily in dependence on others. Citizens, unequal only in enjoyments, would not forget that they were equal by origin, and all were free. Such is the history of ancient Greece and ancient Italy, and here is where that idea originates that, from the most distant times, free governments are seen only in these regions. In our times, the distribution of fortunes in the colonies of North America retain some analogy with the early establishment of agricultural
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