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But now he is called to play the part of a military politician; for when the news arrived in Mexico of the new constitutional revolution of 1820 in Spain itself, all the higher classes of society in the vice-kingdom were in terror.
So it was with the Lady of Remedios; after she had fallen below the dignity of a humbug, and no man was found so poor as to do her reverence, she was spirited away to the Cathedral of the city of Mexico, in order to save her three jeweled petticoats from being stolen, and a child's doll, covered with paste jewels, now personified the great patron saint of the vice-kingdom of New Spain.
I have often stopped to witness the success of a poor old man building a piano, which was both skillfully arranged and well-toned, and yet the tools employed were apparently inadequate for such a purpose. In the same primitive style were coaches built before foreigners came and substituted coaches of modern pattern instead of the old, egg-formed coach-bodies of the vice-kingdom.
At this news a feeling of indignation ran through the vice-kingdom, while all Europe laughed at the strange combination of knave and fool exhibited in the characters of the two Spanish kings. The people of New Spain saw in them only the guardians of the Church in the power of the infidels, and at once forgot the unnatural crimes of their two kings.
With a public spirit unusual among Chinese Viceroys he has devoted the immense revenues of his office to the modern development of the resources of his vice-kingdom. He has erected a gigantic cotton-mill at Wuchang with thirty-five thousand spindles, covering six acres and lit with the electric light, and with a reservoir of three acres and a half. He has built a large mint.
Upon a certain time, one of those strolling monks, with whom the country abounds, chanced to offer an indignity to one of the daughters, and the old man chanced to return the indignity by inflicting upon the monk such a beating as never poor friar had yet received in the vice-kingdom such a one as the feelings of an outraged father alone could justify.
They judged that the safest course for them was the establishment of an empire upon the subversion of the vice-kingdom, which would be so weak a power that they could overawe it. The priests reasoned correctly, and have augmented their privileges and their wealth, as we shall presently see. The Spanish monopolists were ruined by the Revolution, as we have seen in the last chapter.
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. 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.
For three hundred years pure white blood and Spanish birth was an indispensable qualification for promotion in the vice-kingdom, and the slightest tincture of colored blood was an indelible disgrace. But one night of tumult and rapine changed the popular standard of color.
But they were not long in suspense; for when fired upon by an undisciplined rabble, rather than an army, of Indians, they returned the fire, and there, in sight of the city of Mexico, settled the character of a contest which was, from that time forward, to shake the whole social organization of the vice-kingdom in which plantations were destroyed, and villages and cities sacked and burned, and the most unheard-of cruelties practiced by one party or the other on the defenseless, until the final triumph of the Creole, or white troops, in the time of the viceroy, Apaduer, over the insurgents, composed chiefly of Indians and those of mixed blood.
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