of Spaniard entailed on its possessor a full title to every kind of proscription.

PAIN, though vigilant in all that concerned he! financial interests, suffered them to be so totally mismanaged, that from Mexico, where the official revenue was stated at twenty millions of dollars, she received only six millions annually, the rest being swallowed up in expenses in the New World. Every attempt to reform these matters was made, by adding new laws, which merely complicated the system. Meanwhile, the Mexican was kept in total ignorance, and taught to believe his own situation preferable to that of all mankind, because he belonged to a nation superior in power and dignity to the rest of the world.

The principal causes of the Revolution, however, were the restrictions with which commerce and industry were fettered. The preference given to the Spaniards in public offices did not act directly upon the people, who seldom aspired to govern. But the monopoly, supported by the authorities of Spain and Mexico, bore heavily upon them. The full amount of the injustice was made visible to them day by day, as they were called upon to pay with an equal weight of precious metals for those European articles in general use, and above all, for those which their own countrymen would have produced so cheaply and abundantly, if they had not been prohibited. While Spain undertook to supply every market of her colonies, it is notorious that she herself produced scarcely any thing. She was in reality merely a merchant dealing out to her colonies the productions of industrious Europe, which reaped all the actual benefit resulting from the discovery of the transatlantic sources of wealth.

Such is a faint outline of the miserable system by which Spain governed all her colonies for three centuries. It was a system which could not endure long, when the power to enforce it was not retained. It is an immutable law of human affairs, that every system where the advantages are not reciprocal, where the governed do not derive benefit as well as the governors, should fall with the power which has established it. Such was the case in Mexico. The events which occurred in Europe in the beginning of the nineteenth century, developed in the minds of the Mexicans ideas of independence which had never before been popular enough to be translated even into words, but which were now speedily to develop themselves in actions. The French revolution, upturning the whole system of European despotism, diffused somewhat of its spirit into the benighted provinces of Spanish America, and caused the promulgation of sen

timents among the people, which otherwise would have remained the favourite theme of a few philosophers, who might, in the silence of the closet, arrange an ideal drama of the revolution, but who would recoil in horror from the very thought of putting it intc action.

It is the misfortune of the people of Mexico, that their condition under the Spaniards was such as to cut them off from all means of in.provement in the political science. To the sister republic of the United States, political intelligence, and a keen foresight of coming oppression, shed a clear light upon the struggle for national independence; but in Mexico it was the instinctive resistance to intolerable oppression, borne for centuries by the country, which nerved the arm of the patriot; and when liberated from the foreign oppressor, the unfortunate Mexican was still to be subject to all the horrors of domestic military despotism, which substituted perpetual convulsions and civil feuds, for the previous dead calm of unmitigated despotism.

HE intelligent observer, Humboldt, remarks that in 1803, the great majority of the people of Mexico were indifferent to political rights, and not likely to join in any effort to acquire them. It did not escape his close scrutiny, however, that the higher clases of the creoles were irritated by the political insignificance to which they were condemned, and that they regarded the mother country with sullen hatred, and her once formidable resources with contempt. These feelings formed the germ of the revolution, and favourable circumstances soon called them into action. At the commencement of 1808, the government of Mexico was intrusted to Don Jose Iturrigaray, and the vice regal authority seemed to be as firmly established as at any former period. The country was tranquil, the people were occupied in their regular pursuits, and there could be detected nothing in the general calmn to indicate the approaching tempest.

IMPRISONMENT OF THE VICEROY.

149

The agitation commenced on the receipt of the news of the overthrow of the king of Spain by the Emperor Napoleon. The viceroy communicated the intelligence to the government gazette; but singularly enough added no comments to it concerning his future movements. In a few days, however, he became convinced of the error he had committed in not giving a direction to men's thoughts upon such startling information. He attempted to remedy it by a proclamation, soliciting the support of the people, and announcing his determination to preserve, in all emergencies, his fidelity to his and their sovereign. The people received his publication with acclamations, rejoicing greatly in the fact that they had been considered more than ciphers for once, than in the viceroy's loyalty. A kindly feeling sprung up between Iturrigaray and the people, who poured in upon him from every quarter, through their ayuntamientos, the most loyal addresses. A new feeling had been awakened, however, which very soon displayed itself. The ayuntamiento of the capital proposed the creation of a junta, in imitation of the mother country, and the convocation of a national Mexican assembly, composed of deputies from the different provinces.

The viceroy was not inimical to the proposition, but the Audiencia protested against it as opposed both to the privileges of the crown and of the Europeans, and the dispute between that body and the governor ran high, it was finally ended by a band of Europeans in the service of the Audiencia, who surprised the viceroy in his palace in the night, September 15th, and carried him to prison. The Audiencia justified the measure by proclaiming Iturrigaray to the lower classes as a heretic, and formed juntas of public security, and organized armed bands of Spaniards, who under the curious title of patriots, watched zealously the conduct of all who were suspected of being favourable to the imprisoned viceroy. Many persons were arrested, and banished or imprisoned, and the vice-regal authority was confided for the time to the archbishop Lizana. The moderate disposition of this prelate, however, did not suit the fiercer tempers of his coadjutors, and he was replaced in 1809, by the Audiencia, to whom the supreme authority was confided by the central junta of Spain. The feeling of opposition was spreading throughout the country rapidly, and the arrogance and violence of the Audiencia soon brought matters to a crisis. Its character may be fairly estimated from that of one of its principal members, the oidor Bataller, who was wont to say that "while a Manchego mule, or a Castilian cobbler remained in the peninsula, he had a right to govern the Americans." Every where a most impatient desire to shake off the Spanish yoke began to be manifested, and the authorities in vain

attempted to check the insurrectionary movements by arresting all who could be detected in concerting them. When suppressed at one point, the discontent broke out with additional violence at another; the scene of the difficulty only was changed. At length, in the province of Guanaxuato, the cura, Hidalgo, roused his countrymen into action:

ments.

Don Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla was a man of very superior acquireHis reading was extensive, the town of Dolores, of which he was the cura, exhibited many proofs of his activity and intelligence in the manufactures of the parishioners, and the culture of the silkworm, which he had encouraged and introduced. He had planted vineyards of a great extent in the neighbourhood of the town, and thereby increased the resources of his curacy, but an order from the capital destroyed the results of his labours, and threw his people into great distress. Thus private injury was added to his sense of public wrong, and perhaps added to the stern inexorable spirit in which he waged the contest with the equally stubborn and unrelenting Spaniards, and which stamped upon the revolution in the very onset a sanguinary character which it maintained throughout. He proceeded in his movement with little caution, and the government had formed a plan to crush his intended revolt at once, by arresting him and his principal associates. This merely hastened the execution of his scheme, and they commenced the revolution with Allende, and t of his parishioners, on the 16th of September, 1810. On that day h. seized and imprisoned seven Europeans, resident in the town of Dolores, and distributed their property among his followers. The flame thus lighted spread through the country, according to the Spanish accounts, with the rapidity of the atmospheric plague.

N twenty-four hours the number of his partisans had become so numerous that he was enabled, on the 17th of September, to take possession of San Felipe, and on the 18th, of San Miguel el Grande, towns of ten thousand inhabitants each. In both places the confiscated property of the Spaniards gave him the means of still-further increasing his force. A determination to rise against the established order of things was every where manifested; men, unconnected with politics, landowners, resident upon their estates in the most remote provinces, curas, whose lives had been passed in the midst of their parishioners, and young men educated for the law or the church, and just emerging from the university, all flew to arms, and embarked at once in a contest for which they were supposed to be wholly unprepared. Hidalgo next took Guanaxuato, and stormed the public granary, in which the