against the reckless and blood-thirsty soldiery of the Duke of Alva. But
the crowning atrocities of Spain were perpetrated in her American
possessions, and more particularly in Mexico, the richest and most
important of them all.

Assuming that the whole of Spanish America was a gift to the king of Spain
from God's vicegerent on earth, the Roman pontiff, and under the plea that
it was their especial duty to establish his creed, the Spaniards did not
hesitate to accomplish this end by the most lawless and cruel means. Their
unbounded greed of gold led to further oppressions on their part, and
sufferings on that of the Indians; and even the arbitrary, and for the
most part unjust, enactments of the Consejo de las Indias, a council
established for the government of Spain's colonial possessions, were
outheroded and overstepped by the cruel and mercenary individuals to whom
their enforcement was entrusted.

Fearing the eventual day of retribution, every cunning device was
practised to keep down the numbers of the unfortunate natives, and to
retard the growth of their intelligence. By a royal decree, not a town or
village could be founded, nor even a farm-house built, except in the
vicinity of a garrison, convent, or mission. The Spaniards wanted dollars,
not men, and could they have worked the rich mines of Guanaxato, Monte
Real, and elsewhere, with bullocks instead of Indians, would gladly have
seen the whole native population of Mexico exterminated. But when the
storm, which for a time had been averted, at length burst forth, they gave
a loose to their hatred of the unfortunate Mexicans. The rebellion,
premature in its outbreak, and crushed in its first great effort, was
carried on under various leaders, and with varying success, until it
terminated in the final downfall of the Spanish rule. The massacres and
cruelties perpetrated during the eleven intervening years, were beyond
conception horrible; far exceeding in extent and atrocity any thing
recorded in European history. The fearful night of St Bartholomew, the
tortures of the Inquisition, the persecutions in the Cevennes, and later,
the horrors of the French Revolution, sink into insignificance, when
compared with such wholesale massacres as those of Guanaxato and
Guadalajara, and with the sweeping destruction wrought by the Spaniards
throughout Mexico.

"Such and such towns and villages have disappeared from the face of the
earth," was no uncommon phrase in the re