him a blind obedience was at all times a
part of their religion. Whether either of the two were fit to be kings
was not a question for the people to determine; and if the Virgin Mary
had not nodded her approval, the solution of this question of
competency would still be reserved for the tribunals of God and the
Inquisition. It was sufficient for the people to know that both father
and son had been compelled to abdicate, and that they no longer were
kings of Spain, and that the brother of the French Emperor occupied the
vacant throne, which the Inquisition had associated, in their
superstition, with the throne of God itself. God and the king were
inseparable words in the mouth of a citizen of New Spain, and he that
dared to separate them was thought worthy of Inquisitorial fires. They
owed the same reverence which the Aztecs rendered to their emperor
before the conquest.

Next to God and the king was the vice-king. Yet they had seen their
beloved viceroy, Iturrigaray, deposed by a conspiracy of Spanish
shop-keepers, which had organized itself in that focus of Mexican
trade, the Parian. All this was bewildering to the nation. All New
Spain was astonished to see a power sufficiently potent to arrest the
vice-king emanate from such a quarter. And not only had they witnessed
this, but they had also seen this same officer, whose person was so
sacred in their eyes, cast into the prison of the Inquisition among
"heretics, and accursed of God, and despised of Christian men," because
he had not discriminated in favor of the Spanish-born in his appeal to
the patriotism of the people.

Before they had escaped from this bewildering of all their ideas of
government, they were suddenly called upon to take sides in a war of
races that had sprung up in determining the question, who constituted
the people, among the divers races that composed the population of
Mexico? The Cortes of Spain had just proclaimed the sovereignty of the
people. But who were the people? The solution of this question excited
one of the most cruel and envenomed wars on record. The handful of
whites who had been born in Spain, and who enjoyed a monopoly of the
lucrative offices in Church and in State, as well as a monopoly in
trade, claimed it as their exclusive privilege to be considered the
people, and they it was who imprisoned the vice-king, because he
appeared to have more enlarged views than themselves. The Creoles, as
those of pure white blood born in Ame