ogether eradicated. An intelligent writer, as
lately as last year, speaking of the difficulties which the Liberal
Government, now overthrown by the French, had to encounter, says that
they were not a little aggravated by the fact that Benito Juarez, its
head, was an Indian. Though he was one of the most remarkable men who
have risen to power, the haughty Creole could not brook the thought that
an Indian should climb from his _adobe_ hut to be the first personage in
the State. Nor is the fire quite quenched in the Indian's breast. Under
a grave taciturnity he hides burning memories. An acute observer of the
native character remarks,--"I have myself frequently heard Indians, when
their ordinary reserve has been overcome by spirituous liquors, declare
that they were the true owners of the soil, and all others foreign
intruders,--and that, if the Creoles could expel the Spaniards, they
themselves had a far better right to expel the Creoles." We say, then,
emphatically, that the first and perhaps the greatest cause of Mexican
anarchy is that the Mexicans are not as yet a people. Their diverse
elements have not as yet been fused into a living and conscious
nationality.

* * * * *

Another striking cause is the popular ignorance. We are coming more and
more to understand that it is not enough to have the shape and thews of
a man,--that, to be fit for freedom, or long to retain it, a people must
have mental and moral intelligence sufficient to teach them
self-control, and to enable them to judge wisely of public men and
public measures. Now in Mexico there is very little of the regulating
force of a just popular sentiment. You never catch the thunder of the
people's voice, before whose majesty base men and base plans must bow.
This destitution is not a matter of chance. It is another fatal legacy
of the mother-country. Spain steadily resisted all generous culture of
her colonists. She did not hesitate to declare that it was not expedient
that learning should become general in America. A viceroy said, with
more bluntness than courtesy, that "in America education ought always to
be confined to the Catechism." Under one pretence or another, a college
established for the instruction of Indians, in the better days of
Spanish domination, was broken, up. No book was permitted to be printed
in Mexico, or to be imported from abroad, without the consent both of
the civil and ecclesiastical authorities. Und