Miracles and Earthquakes.--The Saints in Times of Ignorance.--The
Eruption of Jorullo.--The Curse of the Capuchins.--The Consequences
of the Curse.--The unfulfilled Curse.--The Population of the
Republic.--Depopulation from 1810 to 1840.--The Mixture of Whites
and Indians not prolific.--The pure Indians.--The Meztizos.--The
White Population.--Negroes and Zambos.--The Jew and the Law of
Generation.--The same Law applies to Cattle.--It governs the
Generation of Plants.--Intemperance and Generation.--Meztizo
Plants short-lived.--Mexico can not be resuscitated.--She can not
recover her Northern Provinces.
Earthquakes are, and ever have been, very frequent through the whole of
Mexico. Yet they have never been very severe, particularly at the city,
as is demonstrated by the very existence of a city upon such a mass of
soft earth as I have shown in a former chapter constitutes the
foundation of Mexico. A reasonable amount of hard shaking would
dislocate its muddy basis and engulf the city. Now and then some
unusually frail structure is toppled down, and the church steeples are
swayed a little this way or that, but the cement that sustains them has
heretofore proved sufficiently cohesive to save them from being shaken
to pieces or tumbled down.[60] Some ten years ago, the convent church,
in which was the miraculous image of our Saviour, was thrown down, and
the image that had annually poured forth its precious blood for the
healing of the spiritual and temporal maladies of all pious believers
was buried under the ruins. But this calamity was only a precursor of a
greater miracle; for, on removing the rubbish, the sacred image was
found intact, and as ready as ever to bleed again to order for ready
pay. The spiritual interpretation of this astounding phenomenon was,
that the devil, in his malice, had attempted, as of old, to crush the
miraculous power of the Saviour; and now, again, as upon the high
mountain, he was foiled, and the flow of blood was not intermitted.
IGNORANCE AND MIRACLES.
Miracles have ever been the most fruitful source of profit that the
Church enjoys, for at the annunciation of every new miracle the
faithful are quickened to devotion and to contributions, which, above
all things, is to be desired by the "impoverished Church" of Mexico.[61]
An earthquake is always a windfall or a godsend to the priesthood. An
outsider is often surprised at the number of miracles that, in old
times, were connected with earthquakes. But rarely do we hear of modern
miracles. The spirit of miracles works only in times of most profound
ignorance; and experience has convinced the Church that the only
prospect of the continuation of miraculous visitations of the holy
Apostles and of the Virgin in Mexico, depends upon the continuation of
the people in the most profound ignorance, and in childlike obedience
to their spiritual superiors. So long as this state of things
continued, the holy Virgin was ever present among them, performing the
most astounding cures, and even, upon one occasion, causing the ground
to open and swallow up the surplus waters of the valley, to the relief
of the "most devout people of Mexico," besides performing other
astounding miracles, that have been duly attested by Pope, prelates,
and the Council of Rites. But now, since the education of the common
people has been attempted, although on a very limited scale, and men
are allowed to speak openly, the most holy Virgin of Guadalupe has
withdrawn her wonder-working power from an unbelieving people, while
the blind, the halt, the lame, the palsied, and the diseased crowd
around her shrine, not to obtain her healing mercy, but to solicit
charity. The saints, also, have ceased to stir up the elements, so that
volcanic fires have ceased throughout the whole limits of the republic,
and earthquakes have almost forgotten to perform their annual duty of
shaking the earth.
The last volcanic eruption in Mexico was one of the most astounding of
which the record has come down to us, whether in Mexico or in any other
country. Fortunately, we have reliable evidence in relation to this
event, for Humboldt not only surveyed the volcano as it appeared in his
day, but, from eye-witnesses of the first eruption, learned the
incidents that fill out the history, and also the miraculous cause
which is assigned for this mighty convulsion of nature. His story I
shall follow in preference to the popular tradition of the awful
consequences that succeeded the curse pronounced by two Capuchin friars
upon the estate of Jorullo.
Just one hundred years ago, which was fifty years before the time of
the visit of Humboldt, two Capuchin friars came to preach at the estate
which occupied the beautiful valley of Jorullo. This valley was
situated between two basaltic ridges, and was watered by two small
streams of limpid water, the San Pedro and the Cuitamba. These small
parallel rivers furnished an abundant supply of water, which was well
employed in irrigating flourishing sugar and indigo plantations. These
Capuchins, not having met with a favorable reception at the estate of
San Pedro, poured out the most horrible imprecations against the
beautiful and fertile plains, foretelling that, as the first
consequences of their curse, the plantation would be swallowed up by
flames rising out of the earth, and that afterward the neighboring
mountains would forever remain covered with snow and ice. After
denouncing the curse, the two holy men went on their way.
ERUPTION OF JORULLO.
On the night of the 28th and 29th of September, 1759, horrible
subterraneous noises were heard, which had been preceded by slight
shocks of an earthquake since the June preceding. The affrighted
Indians fled to the Aquasareo, and soon thereafter a tract of land
twelve miles square, which now goes by the name of the "evil land"
(_mal pais_), rose up in the form of a bladder, and boiled, and
seethed, and bubbled like a caldron of pudding, shooting up columns of
fire from ten thousand orifices. Sometimes a number of orifices would
unite into one vast crater, and vomit forth such a column of fire as
was never before seen by human eyes since the time when "the smoke of
the country went up as the smoke of a furnace."
Intelligent witnesses assured Humboldt that flames were seen to issue
forth, which, from a surface of more than a mile square, cast up
fragments of burning rock to a prodigious height. The two small rivers
were swallowed up, and their decomposed waters added fuel to the
flames, which burned for many months with a fierceness that is
indescribable.
Such is the origin of the volcano of Jorullo, in the State of
Michoican, and such is the pretended consequence of a curse pronounced
by Capuchin monks upon one of the most beautiful estates in the
country; and for generations since, the dread of incurring the
displeasure of strolling vagabond monks has rested like a blight upon
the common people; and yet this is but one of the thousand ways by
which the Mexican priesthood play upon the credulity of the ignorant in
a country where convulsions of nature are matters of almost ordinary
occurrence. Every extraordinary event in nature is ascribed to the
exercise of supernatural power on the part of the clergy or the most
holy images of the Church.
The fires of Jorullo have ceased to burn for half a century. The
central crater that was eventually formed, and the numerous little
orifices of fire, have long since become cold, and all the evidences of
an active fire have passed away. But to this day the Indians watch the
progress of the cooling process; as they anticipate that, before many
years have passed, the unfulfilled portion of the curse will be
realized, and that those now live who will see the surrounding
mountains covered by perpetual snow--an evil which the half-clad
Indians of the tropics appear to dread more than perpetual fire.
The last and only enumeration of the inhabitants of Mexico or New Spain
was made in 1794, by that distinguished Vice-king to whom I have so
often referred, Ravillagigedo. This enumeration gave as the actual
population 3,865,529, besides the departments of Vera Cruz, Guanajuato,
and Cohahuila, which were estimated to contain 518,000 more, making a
sum total of 4,412,529. Since that time there has been a great deal of
extensive guessing, until by this simple process the population was
brought up to 7,661,520, in 1853.[62] The process by which this increase
is effected is to add one sixth for supposed omissions in the census,
and a like number for supposed increase in the subsequent fifteen years
till the breaking out of war, and taking for granted that the
population has not retrograded during forty-five years of intermittent
war. Such conclusions are made in violation of all the laws of
population.
POPULATION OF MEXICO.
It may not be uninteresting to my readers to run over the laws which
regulate the decrease of population, although it is too much our custom
to look only at the other side of the picture. The social and civil
wars of Mexico have been of such a character, as we have seen, as to
warrant the belief that from this cause alone population must have
constantly diminished, from their very commencement in 1810 until 1840,
when matters were comparatively resuscitated. The employment for labor
during the time that the large estates were neglected, and while the
canals of irrigation and the silver mines were in ruins, was of the
most limited character; and the very indigent circumstances to which it
reduced the majority of those who ranked above the _leperos_ must also
have diminished the population of the republic much below that of the
vice-kingdom under Ravillagigedo.
Since 1840, notwithstanding the frequent wars, Mexico, in favored
localities, may have slightly increased in population; but this
increase is more than balanced by the Indian wars of the northern
departments, which have depopulated large tracts of country, sometimes
extending across one tier of states even into the heart of Durango and
Guanajuato; so that I hazard nothing in affirming that the population
of the whole country must be less to-day than it was in 1794,
notwithstanding that Humboldt sets down an estimate of 5,800,000 for
the year 1803, and 6,500,000 for the year 1808. I might go farther, and
affirm that the constant insecurity of life and property in all but the
central parts of the republic is such as to keep down the natural
increase of a population never prolific, being made up of a combination
of uncongenial races--whites and Indians, whose intermixture leads to
sterility.
The census shows two fifths of the population to be pure Indians,
mostly laborers: this class would have been the one most likely to have
increased since the Revolution, had there remained the same amount of
employment and wages as formerly. In consequence of the abolition of
monopolies, the articles necessary for the comforts of life became much
cheaper and more easy of attainment to the laboring classes, which
would tend to increase the number of this class. These Indians,
moreover, had remained to a great extent free from the deleterious
intermixture of white blood. But the pure Indian, compared with the
pure Caucasian, is a race, under the most favorable circumstances, of
slow increase. The diseases hereditary among the Indians are aggravated
by promiscuous marriages, so that in California the missionaries used
to inquire diligently after a man's family connections, and compel a
convert to marry into his own clan, or not marry at all.
The Meztizos, or mixed races, constitute another two fifths of the
population. This is a less vigorous race than the pure Indian. They are
all the children of sin, mostly the offspring of illicit intercourse,
and are for this cause a feebler race than the offspring of the same
mixture where the man was only blessed with a single wife. As all
marriage of whites with Indians in New Spain was unlawful, these
Meztizos bore the same relation to the law in New Spain which the
mulattoes do in our Southern States.
RACES IN MEXICO.
The whites were set down at one million, or about one fifth of the
whole population, at the most prosperous period of the vice-kingdom. I
doubt if they now amount to half or even a quarter of that number, and
of this population there is a very vigorous French immigration, now
amounting to five or six thousand, and about as many Germans, a handful
of English, and still less Americans. The native white population does
not possess the physical energy requisite for rapid increase. They form
no portion of the laboring people; they live in effeminacy, and their
children are not nursed at the healthy breasts of athletic negresses,
as are the children of our Southern planters, but are suckled by a more
enervated race than themselves, viz., the Meztizos. The emigration from
Spain was never an emigration of laboring men. It consisted almost
entirely of priests, stewards, clerks, and taskmasters, to whom labor
was considered as degrading. When the Spaniards lost a monopoly of
these employments, and sank to the level of the native races, their
numbers rapidly declined. The slight foreign immigration above
mentioned is not one of laborers, for labor is considered an unbecoming
employment at Mexico for white men, but an immigration of tradesmen and
shop-keepers, who add nothing to the material wealth of the country.
Of the Mexican Negro race I never knew but two, and one of them held
the post of captain in the army, and the other was the naked alcalde,
mentioned in a former chapter, who was discharging the functions of
"Judge of First Instance." The reasons assigned for the disappearance
of this race from Mexico after so large an importation of slaves as
that which took place in the last century is the incongeniality of the
climate of Mexico, particularly of the table-lands, to the negro
constitution. At the breaking out of the Mexican revolution, almost the
only negro slaves in the country were in the department of Vera Cruz.
The sugar-planters of the hot country of the interior, finding it
impossible to carry on their estates by the use of negro slaves,
attempted to reduce the mortality among their working people by raising
up a race of those disgusting-looking beings called Zambos, a cross of
negroes and Indians; but it was attended with the usual ill success
that has followed every attempt to cross or intermingle different and
distinct races of men, animals, or even plants.
INTERMIXTURE OF RACES.
The advantages arising from transplanting the human race, as well as
vegetables and plants, are manifestly great. But transplanting should
never be confounded with intermixing races, whether they be human, or
of the lower animals, or of plants. When God, in his infinite wisdom,
saw fit to choose out a family that he destined to continue for
thousands of years, He transplanted it into a new soil and climate, and
subjected it to divers migrations. First it went down into Egypt, and
then, "with a high hand and an outstretched arm," He brought it up out
of Egypt, and after a sojourn of forty years in the wilderness, He
re-established it in the land of Canaan. This is the origin of the most
perfectly developed race of the present time. Whether in the tropics or
in the most northern latitudes, the Jew is the same intellectual and
physical man, and carries about with him the indelible marks of a
descendant of those patriarchs who were commanded not to intermarry
with the people among whom they dwelt. The Jew may wander and sojourn
in strange lands, but he cherishes with national pride the blood of
Abraham, which he insists still flows in his veins, and he is most
careful, of all things, to transmit it pure to his children. Though
Canaan abounded with fragments of nationalities, his boast is that his
blood is not intermixed with any of them. To the history of the Jews we
might add the experience of the Franciscan missionaries of California,
that for a healthy offspring a man must marry among his own clan.
The constant complaints we hear of the deterioration of imported
animals of choice breeds is the result of a disregard of this law of
propagation. The importations of Merino sheep, and afterward of the
Saxon, proved a failure chiefly from this cause. Those engaged in the
importation of English cattle begin already to make the same complaint,
which they would not have done had they taken the precaution to import
their foreign stock in families. The Mulatto is an apparent, not a real
exception to the rule. He is superior to the Negro, often superior to
his white father; but it is a superiority for a generation only, and
carries with it the seeds of its own dissolution. The mule is superior
to the donkey, but lasts only for a generation. The Oregon ox, a cross
between the Spanish and American breeds, is superior to either of the
pure breeds. But it is the concentration in one animal of what might be
the material of divers generations.
I once asked a Dutchess county farmer the cause of the great
superiority of his crops of wheat over those of his neighbors, and his
reply was that he always brought his seed from a distance, changed it
often, and took good care not to let it intermix with the wheat of that
region. The same, or, rather, greater results have attended the
transportation of American seeds and plants to California, where a new
soil and a new climate has produced upon all the staples of agriculture
such an improvement as to astonish men who have made this branch of
industry a study. It is the result of the migration of plants where
there are no plants of the same character to intermix, and so
deteriorate the race by crossing the breed. In trees the same law holds
unchangeably. We produce fine fruit by inoculation and by grafting; but
experience has taught us never to inoculate upon a grafted stem, but
always upon a natural branch. As the Conquistadors selected the
best-looking Indian women for the mothers of the Meztizos, so the
fruit-raiser selects the best natural stems to inoculate with his
artificial varieties of fruit. In this way we get better fruit by
exhausting the root, and a whole race of plants are sometimes worn out
by mixture from too close a proximity of the different families of the
same genus. In the laws which Moses gave to the children of Israel, we
find a provision against the evils of intermixtures in the precept:
"Thy cattle shall not gender with diverse kind." "Thou shalt not sow
the field with, divers seeds." In these precepts God has taken care to
guard the wholesome generation of plants as well as of animals.
The successful intermingling of the Protestant Anglo-Saxon immigration
with our own people in the second and third generations is not an
exception to the law of generation, as both are but branches of the
same stock, and are successfully planted together. Nor is the mortality
which follows the Catholic immigration an exception to the beneficial
law of migration, for habits of intemperance account for the short
lives of these immigrants; and though their offspring is abundant, yet
it is all tainted with an inheritance of disease, and too many of the
children suffer the ruinous consequences of having drawn "still slops"
from a mother's breast in infancy. For physically, and in the chain of
generation, most truly are the sins of the fathers visited upon the
children to the third and fourth generation.
Our collection of material for an argument will be complete when I have
added that the trees most prolific of artificial fruit die the
earliest, and suffer most from running sores; that the vines cultivated
artificially to produce the choicest wines suffer most from the mildew,
and the potatoes of the most artificial varieties are the ones that
have suffered most from the rot. When the cholera first visited Mexico,
its passage through the country was like the ravages of the Angel of
Death among the Meztizos and the fragments of decaying races. And this
progress toward depopulation can not be stayed by the infusion of a
vigorous stock. The law of sexuality in plants leads to the
intermarriage of the vigorous with the decaying and the intermixture of
blossoms; nor can human plants long vegetate together without
intermarriages, which ingraft the vigorous constitutions with the virus
of the old and decaying.
PROSPECTS OF MEXICO.
If, then, I have correctly enunciated the law of migration of men,
animals, and plants, and if the law of intermixture of distinct races,
or distinct species of the race, has been truly stated, the important
argument to be drawn from it, which interests all Americans inquiring
into the future of Mexico, is, that the present incongruous fragments
of population which the internal disorders of Spain have set loose in
Mexico can never be transformed into a homogeneous nationality, nor can
sufficiently permanent elements of strength be found in this political
chaos to constitute a permanent government. The degraded condition to
which labor is reduced forbids the idea of an immigration of foreign
laborers, while the miserable scale of wages--a quarter of a dollar a
day upon the estates, payable out of the plantation store, or three
shillings in the towns--holds out no inducement for poor men of a
healthy race to abandon their own country and migrate to Mexico in
sufficient numbers to form a substratum of society which ultimately
might rise into a nationality.
A still more important question is disposed of by the facts stated in
this chapter, viz., that there is no possibility of the present
inhabitants of Mexico ever successfully driving back the Apaches and
reconquering the northern provinces. Her title to the wild regions of
the north, which rests on discovery and colonization, is lost by her
utter inability to subdue the Indians and to colonize, after a
probation of three hundred years. At this day the whole of the northern
provinces lie, like waifs, open to any civilized people to take
possession who require an additional territory. But nothing is so
absurd as the American process of acquisition by treaty of territories
which already are, or soon will be, covered all over by immense
land-claims, in districts subjugated by the Indians, instead of
acknowledging the title of the Apaches to the lands they have conquered
from Mexico, and long held in possession, and purchasing of those who
are the real sovereigns of Northern Mexico.
[60] An attempt was made to explain away the story of Cortez
getting drowned out at Iztapalapan, a point above the level of
the city of Mexico, by suggesting that _perhaps_ an earthquake
may have changed the face of the valley. But, unfortunately,
Iztapalapan was the southern support of the old Indian levee
(_calzado_), built to keep the water off of the city of Mexico in
seasons of heavy rains.
[61] Though the richest ecclesiastical quasi-corporation in the
world, your ears are constantly saluted with solicitations for
contributions to the impoverished Church.
[62] _Colleccion de Leyes_, p. 184.