HE first thought of the conquerors was of propagandism. Cortes had seen, from the hour of landing in the country, that the best means of securing the fidelity of the natives was by converting them to Christianity, and though his efforts for the purpose were such as a soldier might be expected to make, violent and brutal, they were nevertheless ardent and sincere. He and his successors had no mercy for the Mexibroken and burned; the teocallis were razed to the ground; no priest was spared. Monks of both the orders of St. Francisco and St. Augustine. and Dominican friars, flocked

can faith.

The idols were

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to the country during the age succeeding the conquest; and, carried forward by a laudable zeal, extended the sway of the church beyond even that of the government. Every where they found the minds of the people shaken with fear, and ready, as they bent in submission to the strangers, to transfer their homage from Aztec idols to the Christian's Deity. Cortes had availed himself of the ancient tradition respecting Quetzalcoatl, in promoting his designs against the empire. The priests went further, and by pious frauds endeavoured to make the natives believe that the Gospel had been preached in America at a very early period; they found traces of their own faith in the Aztec code, and allowed a latitude to their liturgy hitherto unexampled in the history of the church. The passion of the Indians for flowers was sanctified, dances and disguises were allowed on holidays, even in the interior of the churches; the sacred eagle of the Aztecs was made to serve as an introduction for the Holy Spirit; and, to sum up all in a word, every thing to which the Indians were attached that did not interfere with the main articles of the Christian faith, was respected, and incorporated, to a greater or less extent, in the new ritual. This spirit of accommodation on the part of the clergy, joined to the settled will of the conquerors, explains the rapid spread of the religion of the cross in the new country, in spite of the ardent attachment of the Mexicans to the polytheism of their ancestors. According to Torquemada, the Franciscans baptized six millions of converts in the period extending from 1524 to 1540. Guatemozin, and the small remnant of Mexican nobles who escaped the swords of the Spaniards, embraced the new faith, and the royal family of Tezcuco did the same. Perhaps from the influence of the character and precepts of the wise Nezahualcoyotl and his son, their successors were the most sincere in their professions of the new faith; at all events, Ixtlilxochitl, the chief of the little kingdom, the son of Nezahualpilli, and the faithful ally of Cortes, was the most distinguished by his zeal in the service of the true church. He embraced with great affection, Father Martin, of Valentia, and twelve monks who accompanied him; lodged them in the palace of his ancestors; learned from them with wonderful facility the mysteries of the cross and the passion, and then, taking up the work of the missionaries, he lectured to his subjects, and, by a judicious mixture of precept and command, soon had them ready for baptism. The cere mony of baptizing began to be laborious, and the monks invented an ingenious plan for abridging the ceremony. They divided the multitudes into classes, and conferred the same name at the same time on all the individuals of a class.

The royal preacher was even more zealous than the churchmen

themselves. The old queen, his mother, held firmly to the worship of her gods, and was in consequence in great danger of being burned alive, by her pious son. He preached to her, adduced the best of reasons for embracing the new faith, and finally triumphed over her scruples by carrying her off to the church, where she was baptized by the name of Mary.

Notwithstanding the inutility of such wholesale conversion as regarded many of its subjects, it was beneficial in so far as it abolished all visible signs of the bloody worship of the Aztecs, and prepared the way for the rise of sentiments of a purer cast in the bosoms of the natives. The violent zeal of the bishops is more clearly seen to have been good policy, when we learn that such of the temples as were hidden in the woods and mountains, and escaped destruction at the hands of the Christians, had their regular attendants for many years, some of whom, though they had received the Christian sign on their foreheads, preserved their attachment to their first faith in their hearts. There were thousands of them, however, who were sincere in their conversion, and who retained only one feature of their ancient religion, their excessive veneration for its ministers, which they transferred to the Christian priests. These warriors of the cross constantly opposed their authority to the rapacious and pitiless soldiers of Castile.

T

HEY stood between the conquerors and

the vanquished, extended the cross between the sword and the victim, protected weakness and misfortune every where; and every where weakness and misfortune clung to them as the tender ivy clasps the sturdy oak on which it creeps. For ages the poor Indians pronounced with the greatest love and

veneration the names of Sahagun and Las Casas. The first, whose Franciscan name of Sahagun was derived from the city of his birth, arrived in Mexico, in 1529, and immediately resolved to consecrate his life to consoling, instructing, and improving the condition of the unfortunate natives. He studied the Aztec language with such success that the learned among them regarded him as a classic model, and the remnants of the kindred dynasties of Mexico and Tezcuco, made him their patron and their friend. Antonio de Mendoza, the first viceroy of Mexico, was prevailed upon by the representations of the good father to found a college for the instruction of the young Indians, who were in turn to educate their countrymen. He spread abroad a feeling of enmity towards all who were interested in brutalizing the people, and the good father was always found where injury was to be combatted, griefs consoled, or misery solaced. His death was a calamity deeply felt and long mourned by his unfortunate friends.

The famous Las Casas rivalled him in his indefatigable zeal in the cause of humanity, and by his importunities and representations, the Spanish and papal sovereigns were induced to extend protection to the Indians by the authority of their edicts. These were not much respected, in the first ages after the conquest, it is true, and similar ordinances had to be issued from time to time, for the same purpose, but they were useful in establishing as law the principle, that, though legally disabled from participating in the government, the natives were still freed from vassalage and from burdensome taxes.

They afterwards came under the protection of the priests, who exercised their patronage with laudable humanity. But in the first years after the conquest, the court of Madrid was unable to make its authority rigidly respected in America, and Mexican history presents a period of military anarchy, in which force and caprice usurped the place of right. All landholders, except the small number of nobles, admitted into the Spanish army, or whom alliance with the conquerors protected, were despoiled. To this poor nobility and its vassals were left only a small portion of land among the churches.

The aborigines were employed as beasts of burden, to carry bag gage and drag cannon, and, as auxiliary troops, were placed in the front rank to receive the first weight of the enemy's onset. In the early expeditions of the conquerors they fought for their tyrants against their brothers, and death in its most awful forms, famine, and pestilence, swept them from the land.

At length, when their total extinction seemed not far distant, the decrees of the Spanish court began to be executed, and the oppression of the Indians was regulated, slavery took legal forms. The natives were attached to the soil, and shared out with it among the distinguished soldiers of the conquest, and the officers sent out from the mother country to govern the province, by means of encomiendas or fiefs. The holders of these fiefs, encomienderos, fortunately did not imitate the feudatory lords of Europe in the building of fortresses, but contented themselves by creating haciendas or large farms, in which they lived in dwellings constructed after the fashion of the Aztec nobility. No attempt was made to change the productions of the soil, and the mass of the people remained as before the conquest, poor and debased. They worked contentedly for their masters, attached themselves to their interests, and often assumed their names. Fortunately for them, their conquerors possessed neither the funds