insurgent forces; all fortune abandoned them and
Morelos was captured, court-martialled, judged by the Inquisition, and
shot, in December, 1815.

The tyranny of Ferdinand VII. of Spain gave birth to yet another
scourge for Spanish rule in Mexico. Mina was a Spaniard, a celebrated
_guerilla_ chief in the mountains of Navarre, where he waged war
against Napoleon and the French, and that _casus belli_ being
terminated, strove to raise a revolution against the Spanish sovereign
at Madrid. Frustrated there he fled to London, and Mexican refugees in
that city--among them the _padre_ Mier--enlisted his sympathy for
Mexican independence; and, having obtained adherents both in England
and the United States, Mier landed on the Mexican shores of Tamaulipas
and won a series of brilliant victories with his small force against
the Spanish royalists. But again history records, as it has ever
recorded in the story of freedom throughout the world, that baptism of
failure which must ever precede success; and this young adventurer for
Mexico's independence--he was but twenty-eight--suffered disaster, was
captured, and shot in November, 1817.

Thus it was that the heroic efforts of all these who had given their
lives for the political dream of an independent Mexico laid them
down--not fruitlessly--upon the morning of its consummation. To the
credit of the Church it is that the spirit of freedom first took
material form in men nourished in the shadow of the aisles. In Mexico's
history eternal laurels have crowned the brows of Hidalgo and Morelos;
their names are perpetuated in the great tracts of land which bear
them, and their memory is indelibly enshrined in their countrymen's
hearts. At this period the feathers of Spain's colonial wing were being
plucked one by one. In all the countries of Latin America the
irresistible spirit of change, development, and independence was
sweeping over the New World, bred of the world-march of new thought
which the French Revolution had set in motion. The great nineteenth
century had dawned, and the effects of the convulsions of social life
had been felt, and had furnished springs of action even in remote towns
of the South American Andes and of the Mexican plateau. Caracas and
Chile in 1810, Buenos Ayres in 1813, Mexico in 1821, Peru in 1824--all
showed that the hour of destiny had arrived and that new nations were
being launched upon the world.

CHAPTER VII
THE EVOLUTION OF MODERN MEXICO

M