erent countries in traveling this downward road. The Buddhist of
China, who has reached a thousand-fold lower level than the Catholic,
has his unmarried priesthood, his monks, and nuns, and self-imposed
penances, and tortures, and holy water, and a ritual in an unknown
tongue (Sanscrit), so strikingly resembling the Catholic as to suggest
the idea of a common origin, if such an idea were not impossible. Yet
in the moral standard they seem to have reached the point of total
depravity. Hence we might sum up the cause that have produced the
Mexican of the present day by enumerating the absence of the scriptural
idea of family relation; the despotism exercised by the priesthood with
the aid of an Inquisition, and the unnumbered toll-gates they have
placed on the road to heaven; the effeminacy of the higher classes and
debasement of the peasantry; the absorption of half the revenues of the
country in superstitious and idolatrous purposes, and the uncleanly
habits superinduced by mental and physical degradation for generations,
so that the word _leper_ is used to designate a poor man in the city
where that loathsome disease has its victims.

[63] _Grando Sinoptico de la Republica Mejicana en 1850. Por
Miguel M. Lerdo y Tejado_; approved by the Mexican Society of
Geography and Statistics.

[64] This number 3223 includes all of the 1139 monks, except the
lay brothers. The two classes of priests, those who are not monks
and those who are monks, are distinguished in Catholic countries
as seculars and regulars (_clerigos_ and _religios_). Humboldt
says the Mexican clergy are composed of 10,000 individuals
(_Essai Politique_, vol. i. p. 172), and, including the nuns, and
lay brothers and sisters, he puts the sum total of the religious
at 14,000. But in a note he gives the numbers in five of the
principal departments out of twelve, which foot up at only 5405
for the clergy of both orders.

[65] "The general revenue destined for the maintenance of the
clergy and of religious services in the republic may be divided
into four classes: first, that which appertains to the bishops
and to the canons, who form the chapter of the Cathedral; second,
those revenues which appertain to particular ecclesiastics and
chaplaincies; third, those of curates and vicars; fourth, those
of divers communities of _religios_, of both sexe