146 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



them during all these centuries, superstitious devotees of the church, 

 without a conception of modesty or chastity as recognized by our 

 civilization. Eeports of prefects of departments and governors of 

 states annually present records of an unwholesome condition of public 

 morality, often indicated by the exorbitant proportion of illegitimate 

 births in a population generally amounting throughout Latin America 

 to from 25 to 40 per cent, of the entire number in a republic. 



At a meeting of the American Social Science Association, held in 

 Washington in April, 1901, Ex-Secretary John W. Foster said of the 

 Latin American republics : " The great mass of their populations are 

 ignorant and uneducated; in many of the countries they do not even 

 read and write the official language of their governments, and as a rule 

 have no part in the elections." It has been claimed for the Spanish 

 missionaries that they taught the Mexicans all over that country the 

 Spanish language. Nothing can be farther from the truth. In a 

 population of 14,000,000 not more than 4,000,000 speak the language 

 of the government. When the railroad companies have had to employ 

 laborers from the Sierras, they have been obliged to bring with each 

 gang an interpreter who speaks the dialect of the tribe and Spanish, 

 which the native does not understand. 



These details are mentioned, not to prove, but to illustrate, a condi- 

 tion known beyond the necessity for proof by every intelligent citizen 

 of the world. Every soldier from the Spanish islands learned the fact by 

 personal contact; travelers from all over Christendom who have visited 

 those regions know the truth and entertain their friends with the re- 

 cital. The thousands of Spanish prisoners to American arms in Cuba, 

 transported to their homes, are become missionaries against the tyranny 

 of their native church. All over Spain they have proceeded with vio- 

 lence against an institution that contact with the free thought of 

 America has taught them to hate as the enemy of human rights; the 

 auxiliary of tyrants " clad in the livery of heaven." 



This corrupt ecclesiastical system, still striving to hold in subver- 

 sion the consciences of 60,000,000 human souls in this western conti- 

 nent, is tottering in its power under the contempt of the educated 

 classes, its tyrannical masters and the hatred of the common people, 

 with the progressive intelligence of the popular conscience, to which 

 the clergy is being continually forced to make unwilling concessions. 

 It is also to be observed that contact with the Saxon world is stimu- 

 lating the Latin factor of it to shake off the yoke of that ecclesiasticism 

 which has debauched and, in every moral, intellectual and spiritual 

 sense, degraded the masses to be the scum of the world's populations. 

 At last, the head of the Latin church has aroused to the alarming fact 

 of a great western awakening. Associated press despatches tell us that 

 on June 28, 1903, the pope called tbe bishop of Ibague (Colombia) to 

 an audience, in which he is reported to have conversed on conditions 



