152 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



effective work for freedom of conscience and secular education of the 

 children; for which, in many of the republics, the city councils have 

 established " municipal schools." The course of the Libre Pensador is 

 supported by the higher classes of the community as a veritable watch- 

 man on the tower of free expression, and is doing much to relieve so- 

 ciety of clerical scandals, which it trumpets with terrible denunciation 

 and directness of personality. 



The extraordinary material development of territories rescued from 

 their Mexican slavery under clericalism and raised into the dignity of 

 our American statehood, allowing them all their natural advantages 

 for development, is an index of what the world may witness in the 

 redemption of other Latin American republics. The advance in every 

 higher condition of life in the Eepublic of Mexico, since her partial 

 emancipation from this same wretched rule, affords a great encourage- 

 ment to the moralist, philosopher and statesman, watching the progress 

 of the world in the inarch of free popular thought, applied to the gov- 

 ernment of states. 



The writer is an American, with three hundred years of unmixed 

 American ancestry behind him, and he does not hesitate to declare his 

 belief, after having lived nearly a score of years in Mexico, Central 

 and South America, that if it should be the fortune of any considerable 

 territory of South America to rise into the dominion of English, French 

 or German civilization, it would denote a triumph of regenerating 

 thought over a condition of slavery that should never have been per- 

 mitted to establish a foothold in these continents. It would mean re- 

 publican states that we could respect as neighbors, our equals and our 

 coadjutors in advancing the conditions of liberty throughout the 

 western world, instead of proteges, whose frequent acts of barbarism 

 keep our country in constant apprehension of Monrovian interference 

 that may embroil the nation in a war with the states of Europe. And 

 for what? to sustain a people in maintaining republics? Nothing of 

 the kind; but to save some miserable band of politicians from the 

 punishment due their crimes against the illuminating ideas of this 

 twentieth century, fruit of the highest civilization. 



