TRAVELS IN THE CALIFORNIA S. 311 
nevolence which distinguished those remarkable men, they 
have hung to the present day, like drones upon the honey- 
cells of their predecessors’ labors, till the walls around those 
mission altars have tumbled about their heads, and the people 
of their charge have become nearly extinct. There is indeed 
much excuse for this conduct of the Dominicans, in the fact 
that after the Mexican Republic had supplanted the Spanish 
power in that country, a pack of political mendicants were 
sent thither from Mexico, who were authorized by some of 
the predatory statutes of that government, to control the acts 
of the Padres, remove the neophytes from the jurisdiction of 
their spiritual advisers, and in their zeal for the public weal, to 
rob the missions of their cattle, mules, and other property, for 
their own individual benefit. But this is hardly an excuse for 
their tame submission to such encroachments upon the rights 
of the poor Indian. His own hand had opened the fields of 
his own country; his eye had been raised from the altar of 
his own native hills to that God who succors the weak and 
defenceless, and to that God and his truth he had been devot¬ 
ed by martyrs; and these priests should have been immolated 
rather than have lived to see their fair fabrics, which a holy 
faith had raised among the children of the desert, and the 
moral structures of heavenly love reared by the old Padres, 
on that bloody waste of human nature, destroyed by the un¬ 
hallowed selfishness of such depraved men as were those 
officers of the Mexican Republic. But so it was. The Mis¬ 
sions fell;—and in their place naught is left but a howling- 
ruin. A small part, indeed, of the original number still 
exist; but the buildings even of these are crumbling, and the 
fields are crowded with the columnar cactus, standing where 
the Indian’s bread stuffs were wont to grow—like sentinel 
spirits lingering around the graves of the loved and lost. A 
sad sight indeed to behold are the old missions of Lower 
California ! The wild goat bleats from their falling belfries; 
and the swallow builds his nest among their aisles. 
