and others as they met them; they understood, or rather they divined, the peculiar character of the population, and at once converted, instructed, and protected it. The first missionaries and those who followed after them, were certainly no common men; almost all were educated; many like Fathers Tecto, Gaona, Focher, Vera Cruz, and others had shone in professorships and prelacies; they were of noble birth, and three of them, Fathers Gante, Witte, and Daciano, felt royal blood coursing through their veins. All renounced the advantages promised by a brilliant career; all forgot their hard gained learning to devote themselves to the primary instruction of the poor and unprotected Indians. What inflated doctor, what betitled professor today would accept a primary school in an obscure village?
The Franciscans went everywhere rearing temples to the true God, and with them schools for children. They gave to their principal convents a special plan; the church set from east to west and the school, with its dormitories and chapel at right angles to it, stretching to the north. The square of buildings was completed by the ample court, which served for teaching the Christian doctrine to adults, in the morning before work, and also for the sons of the macehuales or plebeians who came to receive religious instruction; the school building was reserved for the sons of nobles and lords; although this distinction was not rigidly observed.
At first the friars found great difficulty in gathering together boys to fill these schools, because the Indians were not yet capable of understanding the importance of the new discipline and refused to give their boys to the monasteries. They had to appeal to the government that it should compel the lords and principal men to send their sons to the schools; first experiment in compulsory education. Many of the lords, not caring to give up their children, but not daring to disobey, adopted the expedient of sending, in place of their own sons, and as if they were these, other boys, sons of their servants or vassals. But in time, perceiving the advantage these plebeian boys, by education, were gaining over their