high and low by their open participation in common social vices. "These vices have augmented in proportion as the bonds of discipline have been loosened by the distracted condition of the country. Gambling and dissipation are rooted in the clergy as well as in other classes of society; but we may specially declare that the convents of friars, with few exceptions, are in Mexico, sewers of corruption."4 This frail condition of ecclesiastical discipline was satisfactorily proved by the state in which the Catholic church of the United States found the parishes of Texas at the period of annexation; and, it is likely, that many more flagrant instances of laxity will be unveiled in New Mexico and California, to whose distant regions our enlightened and pure Catholic clergymen are already directing their attention with honest and pious zeal.
The Spanish government cherished the church, for state as well as religious reasons. The mayorazos or rights of primogeniture, which bestowed the great bulk of patrimonial estates upon the eldest son, necessarily forced the younger offspring of distinguished houses either into the army or into the church; and, hence the splendid eleemosynary establishments which were erected and endowed all over Mexico, as much for the comfort of these drones of the social hive, as for the worship and glory of God. Most of the lucrative benefices came in this manner into the hands of the Spaniards and their descendants; and by far the greater portion of the higher ecclesiastics were, either influentially allied, or were persons of elevated social rank. Thus it is that even at the present day so many men of distinguished manners and monarchical tendencies, are found among the "high clergy" of Mexico; for the epoch of the revolution is not so distant that the old ecclesiastical stock has entirely departed from earth.
But since the laws of primogeniture have been abolished,—and, with them, the ecclesiastical privilege of enforcing the payment of tithes to the clergy,—the church has been no longer regarded by the best classes as a favorite resort or refuge for their children. The revolution, as we have