Part 16 (1/2)

To show what monastic discipline is in Mexico, I will tell one story, and only one. An English acquaintance of mine was coming down the Calle San Francisco late one night, and saw a man who had been stabbed in the street close to the convent-gate. People sent into the convent to fetch a confessor for the dying man, but none was to be had. There was only one monk in the place, and he was bed-ridden. The rest were enjoying themselves in the city, or fast asleep at their lodgings in the bosom of their families.

In condemning the Mexican clergy, some exception must be made. There are many of the country curas who lead most exemplary lives, and do much good. So do the priests of the order of St. Vincent de Paule, and the Sisters of Charity with whom they are a.s.sociated; but then, few of these, either priests or sisters, are Mexicans.

Among the curious odds and ends which we came upon in Puebla, in the shop of a dealer in old iron and things in general, were two or three very curious old scourges, made of light iron chains with projecting points on the links--terrific instruments, once in very general use. Up to the present time, there are certain nights when penitents a.s.semble in churches, in total darkness, and kneeling on the pavement, scourge themselves, while a monk in the pulpit screams out fierce exhortations to strike harder. The description carries us back at once to the Egyptian origin of this strange custom; and we think of the annual festival of Isis, where the mult.i.tudes scourged themselves in memory of the sufferings of Osiris. A story is told of a sceptical individual who got admission to this ceremony by making great professions of devotion, and did terrific execution on the backs of his kneeling fellow-penitents. Before he began, the place was resounding with doleful cries and groans; but he noticed that the cry which arose when he struck was not like these other sounds, but had quite a different accent. The practice of devotional scourging is still kept up in Rome, but in a very mild form, as it appears that the penitents keep their coats on, and only use a kind of miniature cat-o'-nine-tails of thin cord, with a morsel of lead at the end of each tail, and not such bloodthirsty implements as those we found at Puebla.

It seemed to us that the great influence of the priests in Mexico was among the women of all cla.s.ses, the Indians, and the poorer and less educated half-castes. The men of the higher cla.s.ses, especially the younger ones, did not appear to have much respect for the priests or for religion, and, indeed, seemed to be sceptical, after the manner of the French school of freethinking. It was quite curious to see the young dandies, dressed in their finest clothes, at the doors of the fas.h.i.+onable churches on Sunday morning. None of them seemed to go to ma.s.s, but they simply went to stare at the ladies, who, as they came out, had to run the gauntlet through a double line of these critical young gentlemen. As far as we could see, however, they did not mind being looked at. The poorer mestizos and Indians, on the other hand, are still zealous churchmen, and spend their time and money on ma.s.ses and religious duties so perseveringly that one wishes they had a religion which was of some use to them. As it is, I cannot ascertain that Christianity has produced any improvement in the Mexican people.

They no longer sacrifice and eat their enemies, it is true, but against this we must debit them with a great increase of dishonesty and general immorality, which will pretty well square the account.

Practically, there is not much difference between the old heathenism and the new Christianity. We may put the dogmas out of the question.

They hear them and believe in them devoutly, and do not understand them in the least. They had just received the Immaculate Conception, as they had received many mysteries before it; and were not a little delighted to have a new occasion for decorating themselves and their churches with flowers, marching in procession, dancing, beating drums, and letting off rockets by daylight, as their manner is. The real essence of both religions is the same to them. They had G.o.ds, to whom they built temples, and in whose honour they gave offerings, maintained priests, danced and walked in processions--much as they do now, that their divinities might be favourable to them, and give them good crops and success in their enterprises. This is pretty much what their present Christianity consists of. As a moral influence, working upon the character of the people, it seems scarcely to have had the slightest effect, except, as I said, in causing them to leave off human sacrifices, which were probably not an original feature of their wors.h.i.+p, but were introduced comparatively at a late time, and had already been almost abolished by one king.

The Indians still show the greatest veneration for a priest; and h.e.l.ler well ill.u.s.trates this feeling when he tells us how he happened to ride through the country in a long black cloak, and the Indians he met on the road used to fall on their knees as he pa.s.sed, and ask for his blessing, regardless of the deep mud and their white trousers. However, this was ten years before we were in the country, and I doubt whether the cloak would get so much veneration now. The best measure of the influence of the Church is the fact that when Mexico adopted a republican const.i.tution, in imitation of that of the United States, it was settled that no Church but that of Rome should be tolerated in the country; and this law still remains one of the fundamental principles of the State, in which universal liberty and equality, freedom of the press, and absolute religious intolerance form rather a strange jumble.

It is curious to observe that, though the Independence confirmed the authority of the Roman Catholic religion, it considerably reduced the church-revenues, by making the payment of t.i.thes a matter of mere option. The Church--of course--diligently preaches the necessity of paying t.i.thes, putting their obligation in the catechism, between the ten commandments and the seven sacraments, and they still get a good deal in this way.

We sent our horses to the bath at Pueblo. This is usually done once a week in the cities of Mexico. We went once to see the process while we were in the capital, and were very much amused. The horses had been to the place before, and turned in of their own accord through a gateway in a shabby back street; and when they got into the courtyard, began to dance about in such a frantic manner that the _mozos_ could hardly hold them in while their saddles and bridles were being taken off. Then they put their heads down, and bolted into a large shed, with a sort of floor of dust several inches deep, in which six or eight other horses were rus.h.i.+ng about, kicking, prancing, plunging, and literally screaming with delight. I will not positively a.s.sert that I saw an old white horse stand upon his head in a corner and kick with all his four legs at once, but he certainly did something very much like it.

Presently the old _mozo_ walked into the shed, with his lazo over his arm, and carelessly flung the noose across. Of course it fell over the right horse's neck, when the animal was quiet in a moment, and walked out after the old man in quite a subdued frame of mind. One horse came out after another in the same way, took his swim obediently across a great tank of water, was rubbed down, and went off home in high spirits.

Though slavery has long been abolished in the Republic, there still exists a curious ”domestic inst.i.tution” which is nearly akin to it. It is not peculiar to the plains of Puebla, but flourishes there more than elsewhere. It is called ”_peonaje_,” and its operation is in this wise.

If a debtor owes money and cannot pay it, his creditor is allowed by law to make a slave or _peon _of him until the debt is liquidated.

Though the name is Spanish, I believe the origin of the custom is to be found in an Aztec usage which prevailed before the Conquest.

A _peon_ means a man on foot, that is, a labourer, journeyman, or foot-soldier. We have the word in English as ”_pioneer_” and as the ”_p.a.w.n_” among chessmen; but I think not with any meaning like that it has come to bear in Mexico.

On the great haciendas in the neighbourhood of Puebla, the Indian labourers are very generally in this condition. They owe money to their masters, and are slaves; nominally till they can work off the sum they owe, but practically for their whole lives. Even should they earn enough to be able to pay their debt, the contract cannot be cancelled so easily. A particular day is fixed for striking a balance, generally, I believe, Easter Monday, just after a season when the custom of centuries has made it inc.u.mbent upon the Indians to spend all that they have and all that they can borrow upon church-fees, wax-candles, and rockets, for the religious ceremonies of the season, and the drunken debauches which form an essential part of the festival. The masters, or at least the _administradors_, are accused of mystifying the annual statement of accounts between the labourer and the estate, and it is certain that the Indian's feeble knowledge of arithmetic leaves him quite helpless in the hands of the bookkeeper; but whether this is mere slander or not, we never had any means of ascertaining.

Long servitude has obliterated every feeling of independence from the minds of these Indians. Their fathers were slaves, and they are quite content to be so too. Totally wanting in self-restraint, they cannot resist the slightest temptation to run into debt; and they are not insensible to the miserable advantage which a slave enjoys over a free labourer, that his master, having a pecuniary interest in him, will not let him starve. They have a cat-like attachment to the places they live in; and to be expelled from the estate they were born on, and turned out into the world to get a living, we are told by writers on Mexico, is the greatest punishment that can be inflicted upon them.

There was nothing that we could see in the appearance of these _peons_ to distinguish them from ordinary free Indians; and our having travelled hastily through the district where the system prevails does not give us a right to judge of its working. We can but compare the opinions of waiters who have studied it, and who speak of it in terms of the strongest reprobation, as deliberately using the moral weakness of the Indians as a means of reducing them to slavery. Sartorius, however, takes the other side, and throws the whole blame upon the careless improvident character of the brown men, whose masters are obliged to lend them money to supply their pressing wants, and must take the only security they can get. He says, and truly enough, that the system works wretchedly both for masters and labourers. Any one who knows the working of the common English system of allowing workmen to run into debt with the view of retaining them permanently in their master's service may form some faint idea of the way in which this Mexican debt-slavery destroys the energy and self-reliance of the people.

But in one essential particular Sartorius mis-states the case. It is not the money which the masters lend the _peons_ to help them in distress and sickness that keeps them in slavery. It is the money spent in wax-candles and rockets, and such like fooleries, for Easter and All Saints; in the reckless profusion of drunken feasts on the days of their patron saints, and on the occasion of births, deaths, and marriages. These feasts are as utterly disproportioned to the means of the givers as the Irish wakes which reduce whole families to beggary.

The sums of money spent upon them are provided by the owners of the estates, who know exactly how they are to be spent. If they preferred that their labourers should be free from debt, they could withhold this money; and their not doing so proves that it is their desire to keep the _peons_ in a state of slavery, and throws the whole blame of the system upon them.

I have spoken of the _peons_ as Indians, and so they are for the most part in the districts we visited; but travellers who have been in Chihuahua and other northern states tell stories of creditors travelling through the country to collect their debts, and, where money was not forthcoming, collecting their debtors instead,--not merely brown Indians, but also nearly white mestizos.

Mexico is one of the countries in which the contrast between great riches and great poverty is most striking. No traveller ever enters the country without making this remark. The ma.s.s of the people are hardly even with the world; and there are some few capitalists whose incomes can scarcely be matched in England or Russia. Yet this state of things has not produced a permanent aristocracy.

The general history of great fortunes repeats itself with monotonous regularity. Fortunate miners or clever speculators, who have happened to possess the gift of acc.u.mulating in addition to that of getting, often make colossal fortunes. Miners have made the greatest sums, and made them most rapidly. Fortunes of two or three millions sterling are not uncommon now, and we often meet with them in the history of the last century. They never seem to have lasted many years. Before the Independence, the capitalist used to buy a patent of n.o.bility, and leave great sums to his children to maintain the new dignity; but they hardly ever seem to have done anything but squander away their inheritance, and we find the family returning to its original poverty by the third or fourth generation.

Mexico is an easy place to make money in, in spite of the continual disorders that prevail. In the mining-districts most men make money at some time or other. The difficulty lies in keeping it. There seems to be no training better suited for making a capitalist than the life of the retail shopkeeper, especially in the neighbourhood of a mine. A good share of all the money that is won and of all that is lost stops in his till. Whoever makes a lucky hit in a mining-speculation, he has a share of the profits, and when there is a ”good thing” going, he is on the spot to profit by it.

When once a man becomes a capitalist, there are many very profitable ways of employing his money. Mines and cotton-factories pay well, so do cattle-haciendas in the north, when honest administradors can be got to manage them; and discounting merchants' bills is a lucrative business.

But far better than these ordinary investments are the monopolies, such as the farming of the tobacco-duty, the mints, and those mysterious transactions with the government in which ready cash is exchanged for orders to pa.s.s goods at the Custom-house, and the other financial transactions familiar to those who know the s.h.i.+fts and mystifications of that astonis.h.i.+ng inst.i.tution, the Finance-department of Mexico.

We rode from Puebla to Orizaba. Amozoque, the first town on the road, is a famous place for spurs, and we bought some. They are of blue steel inlaid with strips of silver, and the rowel is a sort of cogged wheel, from an inch and a half to three inches in diameter. _(See page 220.)_ They look terrific instruments, but really the cogs or points of the rowels are quite blunt, and they keep the horse going less by hurting him than by their incessant jingling, which is increased by bits of steel put on for the purpose. Monstrous as the spurs now used are, they are small in comparison with those of a century or two ago. One reads of spurs, of gold and silver, with rowels in the shape of five-pointed stars six inches in diameter. These have quite gone out now, and seem to have been melted up, for they are hardly ever to be seen; but we bought at the _baratillo_ of Mexico spurs of steel quite as large as this.

My companion sent to the Art-exhibition at Manchester a couple of pairs of the ordinary spurs of the country, such as we ourselves and everybody else wore. They were put among the mediaeval armour, and excited great admiration in that capacity!

We slept at Nopalucan that night, and rode on next day to San Antonio de Abajo, a little out-of-the-way village at the foot of the mountain of Orizaba. Our princ.i.p.al adventure in the day's ride was that, finding that our road made a detour of a mile or so round a beautiful piece of green turf, we boldly struck across it, and nearly lamed our horses thereby; for the ground was completely undermined by moles, and at every third step the horses' feet went into a deep hole. We had to get off and lead them back to the road.

Orizaba is the great feature in the scenery of this district of Mexico.