tar, I should not be surprised if the larger estimate was nearer the
truth.

But details are of little importance. The actual administration may be a
little more or less rigid or lax. In its legal character, the government
is an unmixed despotism of one nation over another.

RELIGION

No religion is tolerated but the Roman Catholic. Formerly the church was
wealthy, authoritative and independent, and checked the civil and
military power by an ecclesiastical power wielded also by the dominant
nation. But the property of the church has been sequestrated and
confiscated, and the government now owns all the property once
ecclesiastical, including the church edifices, and appoints all the
clergy, from the bishop to the humblest country curate. All are salaried
officers. And so powerless is the church, that, however scandalous may
be the life of a parish priest, the bishop cannot remove him. He can
only institute proceedings against him before a tribunal over which the
government has large control, with a certainty of long delays and entire
uncertainty as to the result. The bishopric of Havana was formerly one
of the wealthiest sees in Christendom. Now the salary is hardly
sufficient to meet the demands which custom makes in respect of charity,
hospitality and style of living. It may be said, I think with truth,
that the Roman Catholic Church has now neither civil nor political power
in Cuba.

That there was a long period of time during which the morals of the
clergy were excessively corrupt, I think there can be no doubt. Make
every allowance for theological bias, or for irreligious bias, in the
writers and tourists in Cuba, still, the testimony from Roman Catholics
themselves is irresistible. The details, it is not worth while to
contend about. It is said that a family of children, with a recognized
relation to its female head, which the rule of celibacy prevented ever
becoming a marriage, was general with the country priesthood. A priest
who was faithful to that relation, and kept from cockfighting and
gambling, was esteemed a respectable man by the common people. Cuba
became a kind of Botany Bay for the Romish clergy. There they seem to
have been concealed from the eye of discipline. With this state of
things, there existed, naturally enough, a vast amount of practical
infidelity among the people, and especially among the men, who, it is
said, scarcely recognized religious obligations at all.

No one can observe th