but true portrait of national selfishness has been so often verified by all the colonial historians of America, and especially by Pazo and Zavala, in their admirable historical sketches of Castilian misrule, that we deem it fair to introduce these palliations of Mexican misconduct since the revolution.1
The people of New Spain were poor and uneducated,—the aristocracy was rich, supercilious, and almost equally illiterate. It was a society without a middle ground,—in which gold stood out in broad relief against rags. Was such a state of barbaric semi-civilization entitled or fitted to emerge at once into republicanism? Was it to be imagined that men who had always been controlled, could learn immediately to control themselves? Was it to be believed that the military personages, whose ambition is as proverbial as it is natural, would voluntarily surrender the power they possessed over the masses, and retire to the obscurity and poverty of private life when they could enjoy the wealth and influence of political control, so long as they maintained their rank in the army? This would have been too much to expect from the self-denial of creole chiefs; nor is it surprising to behold the people themselves looking towards these very men as proper persons to consolidate or shape the government they had established. It was the most natural thing conceivable to find Iturbide, Guerrero, Bustamante, Negrete, Bravo, Santa Anna, Paredes, and the whole host of revolutionary heroes succeeding each other in power, either constitutionally or by violence. The people knew no others. The military idea,—military success,—a name won in action, and repeated from lip to lip until the traditionary sound became a household word among the herdsmen, rancheros, vaqueros and Indians,—these were the sources of Mexican renown or popularity, and the appropriate objects of political reward and confidence. What individual among the four or five millions of Indians knew anything of the statesmen of their country who had