t serves them for a
bed, a serape as an overcoat by day and a blanket at night. The men wear
a coarse, unbleached cotton shirt and cotton drawers reaching to the
knees, leaving legs and feet bare. The women wear a loose cotton chemise
and a colored skirt wrapped about the loins, the legs, feet, and arms
being bare. They supply the town with poultry, charcoal, eggs, pottery,
mats, baskets, and a few vegetables, often trotting thirty miles over
hills and plains with a load of one hundred and twenty pounds or more on
their backs, in order to reach the market, where a dollar, or perhaps
two, is all they can hope to get for the two or three days' journey.

An Indian will cheerfully spend four days in the mountains to burn a
small quantity of charcoal, load it upon his back, and take it
twenty-five miles to market, where it will sell for half a dollar or
seventy-five cents. When he gets home, he has earned from ten to fifteen
cents a day, and traveled fifty or sixty miles on foot to do it! If the
poor native lives anywhere within the influence of a Catholic priest,
the probability is that the priest will get half of this pittance. There
is a local saying here that "Into the open doors of the Roman Catholic
Church goes all the small change of Mexico." This is a sad story, but it
is a true one; and it represents the actual condition of a large class
of the country people known as Indians. The condition of our own Western
tribes of aborigines is, in comparison, one of luxury. And yet these
Mexicans, as a rule, are temperate and industrious. The women, though
doomed to a life of toil and hardship, are not made slaves, nor beaten
by fathers or husbands, as is too often the case among our Western
tribes.

We are speaking of the Aztecs pure and simple, such as have kept their
tribal language, habits, and customs. They form nearly two thirds of the
populace of the republic, and, as a body, are ignorant to the last
degree, complete slaves to superstition of all sorts. The idolatrous
instinct inherited from their Indian ancestors finds satisfaction in
bowing before the hosts of saints, virgins, pictures, and images
generally, which the Catholic Church presents for their adoration; while
their simplicity and ignorance permit them to be dazed and overawed, if
not converted, by a faith which presents itself in such theatrical form
as to captivate both their eyes and ears. "This people have changed
their ceremonies, but not their religiou