his vices, and they are glaring
enough, but he is certainly not worse than his white neighbor. I had
been so long in California, and had seen so many exhibitions of courage
in street-fights and personal encounters, that I had come almost to
consider the words white man and brave man as synonymous. But when I
found myself in Mexico at the breaking out of a civil war, I soon
learned that white men are not always brave, and that they were
superior to the Indian in little else except in the gilding with which
they covered their vicious and corrupt lives. They borrow their customs
from Paris and their style of living, but their morals are even below
the Paris standard of virtue.

WOMAN'S RIGHTS AT MEXICO.

The law, which sinks the civil existence of the wife in the husband,
and which charges the husband with liability for the debts and
trespasses of the wife, is sometimes stigmatized as harsh, unnatural,
and tyrannical. If those that consider it so could for a little while
enjoy the matrimonial freedom of Mexico, they would soon discover
abundant reason for praising the wisdom of our ancestors in hedging
about with so many disabilities an institution which is both the
safeguard of public morality and of our free government. Family
government, self-government, and political freedom dwell together;
while despotism and family license are inseparable. At Mexico, old
family relations are not broken up by new marriages. Household family
worship is unknown, but, like so many pagans, each one trudges off to
say her prayers separately, and at a favorite shrine. The wife has her
separate property and interests, which she manages with the aid of her
"next friend." The husband, too, has his separate interests, and too
often his "next friend" is his neighbor's wife.

After my return from Mexico, I heard a woman in a public assembly
advocating, as social reforms, the institutions of a country in a state
of moral and political decomposition. I felt like exclaiming, "Cursed
be that woman who would introduce into our happy country the social
customs of paganism; and cursed be that people who listen to her
infidelity!" May a like evil fall upon those legislative tinkers who
have deprived the husband of the power of creating a trust for the
protection and support of his wife in time of necessity.

We have examined sufficiently the social condition of Mexico to show
that there is no natural sympathy between the whites and the colored
rac