f the
Gachupins. But few of the better class of Creoles were to be found
amongst the insurgents; and the strife was to all appearance between the
Indians and half-bloods, on the one hand, and the property and
intelligence of the country, represented by the Spaniards and Creoles,
on the other.

The Creoles, although considerably less oppressed than the coloured
races, had felt themselves more so; because, being more enlightened and
civilized, they had a livelier feeling and perception of the yoke than
the Indians and half-castes. Children and descendants of the Spaniards,
who looked with sovereign contempt upon every thing Creole, even to
their own offspring, the white Mexicans imbibed hatred of Spain almost
with their mothers' milk. Far from enjoying what the letter of the law
gave them, the same rights as their European fathers, they found
themselves driven back among the people; while all offices and posts
were filled by Spaniards, who, for the most part, came to Mexico in
rags, and left it possessed of immense wealth. Even the possession of
magnificent estates, with their incalculable subterranean treasures, was
of precarious benefit to the Creoles; for the Spaniards paid small
respect to the laws of property, and, in the name of their royal master,
assumed unlimited power over the land.

The bitterness of feeling consequent on this state of things, at length
roused into activity the latent desire of freedom from the Spanish rule,
a freedom which was to have been obtained by the conspiracy already
referred to. On a given day, there was to have been a general rising
throughout Mexico; all the Spanish officers and _employes_ were to have
been arrested, and their places filled by Creoles; the seaports were to
have been seized and garrisoned, so as to prevent succours coming to the
Spaniards from the neighbouring island of Cuba. The discovery and
premature outbreak of the plot, as already mentioned, were the causes of
its failure. Hidalgo, who was too deeply compromised to recede, had put
himself at the head of the revolution, and enraged against the Creoles,
who had, for the most part, managed to draw their heads out of the
noose, commenced with his Indians a war of extermination that spared
neither Spaniards nor Creoles. This terrible blunder on the part of the
soldier-priest, of itself decided the fate of the outbreak. The Creoles
were compelled to unite with the very Spaniards whose downfall they had
been plotting;