ves. The closing chapter of their history, to which
we have now to turn, is mainly concerned, not with their spiritual
management, or with their success or failure in the work they had been
given to do, but with the general movement of political events, and the
upheavals which preceded the final conquest of California by the United
States.

In considering the attitude of the civil authorities towards the mission
system, and their dealings with it, we must remember that the Spanish
government had from the first anticipated the gradual transformation of
the missions into pueblos and parishes, and with this, the substitution
of the regular clergy for the Franciscan padres. This was part of the
general plan of colonization, of which the mission settlements were
regarded as forming only the beginning. Their work was to bring the
heathen into the fold of the church, to subdue them to the conditions of
civilization, to instruct them in the arts of peace, and thus to prepare
them for citizenship; and this done, it was purposed that they should
be straightway removed from the charge of the fathers and placed under
civil jurisdiction. No decisive step towards the accomplishment of this
design was, however, taken for many years; and meanwhile, the fathers
jealously resisted every effort of the government to interfere with
their prerogatives. At length, with little comprehension of the nature
of the materials out of which citizens were thus to be manufactured, and
with quite as little realization of the fact that the paternal methods
of education adopted by the padres were calculated, not to train their
neophytes to self-government, but to keep them in a state of perpetual
tutelage, the Spanish Cortes decreed that all missions which had then
been in existence ten years should at once be turned over to bishops,
and the Indians attached to them made subject to civil authority. Though
promulgated in 1813, this decree was not published in California till
1820, and even then was practically a dead letter. Two years later,
California became a province of the Mexican Empire, and in due course
the new government turned its attention to the missions, in 1833
ordering their complete secularization. The atrocious mishandling by
both Spain and Mexico of the funds by which they had been kept up, and
the large demands made later upon them for provisions and money, had
by this time made serious inroads upon their resources; notwithstanding
which