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