sed!' Such an one who found, a few years ago, too
great a freedom, to-day demands very much more; and this is, doubtless,
because each one has his own idea of liberty, and it is impossible to
create a liberty for each one.--Liberty to empty the treasury of
the state.--Liberty to seize public position.--Liberty to gather
in sinecures.--Liberty to get one's self pensioned for imaginary
services.--Liberty to calumniate, abuse, revile the most venerated
things.--Is this to enjoy liberty? No, it is to abuse it, to profane it.

"It is, then, shown that no one is agreed on what is political liberty;
but it is not that about which I wished to write. It is a freedom
composed, I will not say of all men, but of all beings who are in
existence; it is this that nature demands imperiously; it is this, in
truth, that crime compels society to take away from the wrong-doer; but
it is this, also, that injustice and force snatch away from the unhappy
slave."

Thus wrote Captain Duhaut-Cilly in his journal for the year 1827,
contrasting his ideal of freedom with the actual condition of the
aborigines in California, under the domination, as they were at that
time, of the Catholic Church, through its agent, the order of the
Franciscans.

Just a few words are necessary here as an introduction to the story
of Pomponio, to enable the reader to have a clear impression of the
condition of affairs, political and ecclesiastical, in the province of
Nueva California during the first thirty years of the past century.
When the country was explored and settled by the Franciscans, their
ostensible and, in the earlier days, real, aim was to civilize the
Indians, teaching them to live useful, moral lives, and instructing them
in the doctrines of Christianity. But to do this, force was necessary
to subdue the turbulence of insubordination. Gradually, at last, the
greater number of the natives were forced under the rule of the friars,
who brought them to such subjection as was actual slavery in all but in
name. It is a matter of regret that this was so, yet, though an evil,
it was a necessary one, for to do any measure of good to the Indians,
an oversight in every detail was essential; and, after all, the savages
were treated with almost uniform mildness, and the instances of cruelty
and wickedness practiced toward them, as in this tale of Pomponio, were
most happily very rare. It is a blot on the history of the Franciscans
in California that there was a