one of greed, oppression, and injustice, alternating with periods of
enlightened effort on the part of individual viceroys more high-minded
than their fellows.

With the early nineteenth century came the stirring of a people long
crushed into impotence. The mother country was in the throes of a great
war against the foreign invader. Deserted and abandoned by its Spanish
sovereign, and ruled, where it was ruled at all by civilians, by a body
of self-elected revolutionary doctrinaires, the colonists of the
various Viceroyalties of America promptly shook themselves free from
the nerveless grasp that had held them so long. A demand for an immense
sum of money beyond that which had voluntarily been sent by Mexico to
aid the mother country against Napoleon was refused in 1810, and a few
months afterwards the long gathering storm burst. The man who first
formulated the Mexican cry for freedom was a priest, one Miguel
Hidalgo. He had already organised a widespread revolutionary
propaganda, and on September 16, 1810, the Viceregal authorities
precipitated matters by suppressing one of the clubs, at Queretaro, in
which the independence of the country was advocated. Hidalgo at once
called his followers to arms, and under the sacred banner of the Virgin
of Guadalupe, the patron saint of Mexico, led some 50,000 ardent
patriots through the country towards the capital that had once been
Montezuma's. Subduing all the land he crossed, Hidalgo finally met the
royal troops on the 30th of October and completely routed them. Then
the rebel army gradually fell to pieces in consequence of unskilful
management, and at a subsequent battle in January, 1811, was entirely
defeated, Hidalgo and his lieutenant being shortly afterwards captured
and shot.

But the fire thus lit could never again be entirely extinguished. For
years the intermittent struggle went on under another priest, Morelos,
a true national Mexican hero who was betrayed to the Spaniards in 1815,
and punished first by the Inquisition as a heretic and afterwards shot
as a traitor to the King of Spain. The sun of the Spanish domination of
Mexico set in blood, for the wretched reactionary Ferdinand VII. was on
the throne of the mother country, determined if he could to terrorise
Spanish America into obedience as he had done Spain itself. His
eagerness to do so defeated itself. A large army, collected at Cadiz
for the purpose of crushing Mexico into obedience, revolted against the
d