Inquisition. The complaint against the Vice-king
was that he was about to recognize the political equality of the
native-born population with the emigrants from Spain. For this offense,
his reputation and that of his kindred was to be forever blackened by a
suspicion of heresy.

In the night of the Acordada insurrection, the Spanish shop-keepers of
the Parian found themselves utterly defenseless. They could no longer
invoke the aid of the Inquisition in oppressing and trampling on the
people, whom their wantonness, and the wantonness of others like them,
had brutalized. The neglect and oppression which had reduced a laboring
man to a _lepero_ had not made him insensible to the unequal laws
which elevated above him a race of beings destitute of that manly
courage which oftentimes gives plausibility to oppression. Now the
lepero took delight in visiting upon the present occupants of this
building a fearful punishment for the crime committed there twenty
years before, and among the guilty crowd there was to be found many an
innocent sufferer.

The isolated crowds that had been traversing the streets, and indulging
their wantonness on a small scale, at length, as the night wore away,
began to concentrate around the Parian, and quickly such devastation of
property was made as might be expected where the rich and poor had no
common interest in its preservation, and where criminal and poor man
were almost convertible terms. The plunderers had little idea of the
value or uses of the property they were scattering to the winds; and
while they wasted millions worth of property, they wantonly shed the
blood of the proprietors in the midst of their merchandise. Nor did the
evil end when daylight appeared; for among the consequences of this
night insurrection was the transfer of all authority to new hands.
Those who the day before had been stigmatized with the impurity of
their blood, were now the governing power, who, under the forms of law,
were to carry into effect the behest of the successful insurgents.
Neither the sight of the ruins of the night before, nor bales of
merchandise strewed about among corpses and spattered with blood, could
move the new masters of the city to pity the fallen condition of a
class of men who had proved themselves too cowardly to defend their own
usurpations, and too tyrannical to instill into the lately proscribed
races any ideas of compassion.

THE OVERTURN.

For three hundred years pure whi