GERMAN INFLUENCE IN LATIN AMERICA 145 



ular mind to the habit and method of independent thought. In the 

 parochial schools of the present, where the children have their first 

 and, generally, their only training, the object appears to be the drilling 

 into the young mind supreme reverence for the power of the clergy to 

 inflict future punishment and bestow reward, with the church as an 

 object of veneration in place of Deity. 



The Eoman pontiff is now without influence in appointing the arch- 

 bishops, or superior clergy, in any Latin republic. The supreme 

 political power of the state nominates the candidate because of his 

 political relation to the party in power, and he is confirmed by the 

 pope without question. By this method only can Eome maintain the 

 slim hold it now possesses on a people, of whom the educated classes, 

 clergy and laity alike, are agnostic when they are not absolutely 

 atheistic. Their church is simply an institution of society, which con- 

 fers a child's name with ceremonious dignity, marries him with the 

 customary, established form and receives his dying breath in such 

 compliance with ecclesiastical demand as shall secure for the corpse a 

 burial in consecrated ground, which means a " respectable " interment. 



So universally detestable is the popular reputation of the Latin 

 American priest that in the more civilized cities of their realm they 

 are not admitted to social life in the upper circles of society by self- 

 respecting husbands and fathers of young wives and daughters. A re- 

 sult of this moral debasement in the font of ethical teaching is the 

 general dull public conscience concerning all obligations, social, polit- 

 ical and economic, that we actually find in existence throughout Latin 

 America. It is seen in the smallest business transactions and the most 

 important financial contracts. A South American bond without hy- 

 pothecated security is a broad jest in all financial centers. 



The aboriginal population of those regions are not civilized, but 

 have been christianized through a system of oppression that has en- 

 dured five centuries. Sarcastically entitled " citizens," they are with- 

 out a voice in government, and when their tribal center is far removed 

 from the larger cities, they are in a more repulsive condition of bar- 

 barism than when the cross was first raised over them. 



When Pizarro subjugated the gentle subjects of the Incas, Peru had 

 a population of 12,000,000 industrious, virtuous and contented souls, 

 since reduced by Spanish slavery to less than 3,000,000; to-day, after 

 a half century of recuperative government, raised to nearly 4,000,000, 

 the systems of their christian conquerors having slain 9,000,000 in the 

 mines by the meta, which kept one seventh of the population always 

 at work for their masters, the Spaniards. Cannibals still roam in the 

 territories about the head waters of the Amazon. In Mexico are dis- 

 tricts where the women know no other dress than a piece of cotton 

 dropping from the waist to the knee; and the Jesuits have controlled 



VOL. lxxii. — 10 



