that indifference to blood which appears to be
characteristic of the Mexican people, or at least of that portion of
them who have concerned themselves with public commotions. Some terrible
elements have entered into this Mexican stock. The Spaniard, one of its
sources, has written his name in blood in the history both of the Old
and the New World. Whether hunting out the remnants of the unhappy
Moriscos from the fastnesses of their native hills,--or torturing the
Jews in the dungeons of his Inquisition,--or with lust and murder
filling to the brim the cup of horror and misery for the captive cities
of Holland,--or exterminating, in the pitiless labor of the mines, the
peaceful aborigines of San Domingo,--or with Cortes putting to slaughter
a whole city on mere suspicion,--everywhere the Spaniard has recorded
great deeds with a pen of iron dipped in blood. And the Aztec, the other
source of that stock, had, if we are to credit his conqueror, a cruel
and merciless side to his character, which made him the peer of his
oppressor.

The Mexican Revolution had its horrible chapters. And impartial truth
demands that we should say that both sides made fearful contributions to
those chapters. Hidalgo, the first popular leader, wrote to his
lieutenant these terrible words:--"If you suspect your prisoners of
entertaining restless or seditious ideas, bury them in oblivion at once
by putting them to death in some secret and solitary place, where their
fate may remain forever unknown." His practical commentary was a
permission to his followers to slay every white whom they could find in
the first stronghold which they stormed, and afterwards many a midnight
execution in the gloomy ravines of the mountains. On the other hand,
Calleja, the King's general, boasts that after the Battle of Aculco he
put to death five thousand insurgents in cold blood. And Iturbide, then
a Government general, writes, under date, "Good-Friday, 1814, In honor
of the day I have just ordered three hundred excommunicated wretches to
be shot":--a missive in which we know not which to admire most, the
hideous brevity, the blasphemy, or the cruelty. One act of noble
clemency stands out in peculiar sweetness from this background of
horror. When Morelos had given to his lieutenant, Bravo, three hundred
of the King's soldiers to be used as a ransom for his father, who was a
prisoner in the hands of the Royalists, and when the viceroy, Venegas,
scornfully rejected the