history of Mexico, from the earliest period of its conquest, is one
continuous record of oppression and cruelty on the one hand, of long and
bitter suffering on the other. Deprived of its religious and customs,
its priesthood and legitimate sovereigns mercilessly tortured and slain,
its temples and institutions annihilated, its very history and
traditions blotted out, Mexico, in the hands of the Spaniards, was
rapidly transformed from a flourishing and independent empire into a
huge province; while its inhabitants became a disposable horde, on whom
the conquerors seemed to think they were conferring a benefit, when they
made gift of them by hundreds and thousands, like sheep or oxen, to a
lawless and reckless soldiery. Their houses and lands, sometimes even
their wives and children, were snatched from them, and they were driven
in herds to labour in the mines, or condemned to carry burdens over
pathless and precipitous mountains; like the Gibeonites of old, they
were made hewers of wood and drawers of water to all the congregation.
Expelled from the towns, and confined to hamlets and villages, whence
they were only summoned to toil in the service of their oppressors, they
became in time entirely brutalized, losing the finer and more noble
qualities that distinguish man from the beast of the forest, and
retaining only a bitter sense of their degradation, a vivid impression
of the sufferings they daily endured, and a gloomy instinctive longing
after a bloody revenge.

With these Indians, who, at the commencement of the present century,
composed two-fifths of the population of Mexico, may be classed a race
of beings equally numerous, equally unfortunate and destitute, and still
wilder and more despised--namely, the various castes sprung from the
intercourse of the conquerors of the country, of their successors and
slaves, with the aborigines. These half-bloods, who united the apparent
stupidity and real apathy of the Indian with the lawlessness and
impatience of restraint of their white fathers, found themselves driven
out into a world that branded them for the accident of their birth;
deprived of all property, and reduced to the most ignoble employments;
continual objects of fear and detestation to the better classes, because
they had nothing to risk, and every thing to gain, by a political
convulsion. Such were the principal elements of a population which,
after centuries of patient endurance, was at last roused to ente