POLITICAL HISTORY. 333 
pated, hopeless and impoverished, and living without those sanctions and 
restraints that alone make life valuable or useful. Such were the reck- 
less crews that first set forward in the conquest of this hemisphere, without 
the common sympathies of humanity ; regardless of the laws of nature or 
nations, and, indeed, heedless of everything but the acquisition of treasure 
or territory, by a warfare that degenerated into the murder of people to 
whom the name of the Spanish king, or the idea of the Christian's God, had 
never been revealed, even in their wildest dreams. 
Thus was the foundation of the new Empire laid, in the violent destruc- 
tion of an ancient religion and monarchy. 
Families of character and distinction soon came over, and the new do- 
main was rapidly filled with a population willing to take advantage of its 
resources ; — but several things impeded the social and moral progress of 
New Spain. 
It was but a colony ; and a colony, too, devoted by the mother country to 
none of those branches of industry that foster the independent and manly 
growth of a people, and bring out the mind of a nation. It was the mine 
and mint of Spain. 
It was taught to believe, that silver was a sort of vegetable product of 
the earth, growing like flowers, and to be had for the asking. And thus 
at the outset of its career, the germ of industrious self-reliance and inde- 
pendence, was withdrawn from the fostering policy of the parent State. 
Commerce, manufactures, and an extensive agriculture, — looking to all 
parts of the world as its consumers, — were discouraged, and the infant 
colony was forced to receive from Spain the results of her industry, while, 
in turn, it sent nothing back that indicated genius, talent, activity, enter- 
prise, invention; — or, indeed, anything but that its valleys and hills con- 
tained exhaustless quantities of precious metals, which it could drag from 
their recesses and transmute into coin by the labor of enslaved and 
ignorant Indians. 
Nor was New Spain opened to the colonization of other nations, who 
might have been invited to a healthful and energizing mixture of races. 
On the contrary, the Spaniards grafted themselves upon the conquered 
and debased aborigines, and the mongrel blood became dull and indolent. 
Although the laws of the Indies were calculated to protect the natives, 
they, nevertheless, suffered dreadfully under the prescriptive adminis- 
tration of colonial power ; and, becoming the victims of avarice, were 
gradually degraded, step by step, to the helot condition in which we find 
them at the present day. 
" Instead of restraints on the claims of ecclesiastics, the inconsiderate 
zeal of the Spanish lesgislators," says Dr. Robertson, " admitted them into 
America to their full extent, and at once imposed on the Spanish colonies 
a burden, which is in no slight degree oppressive to society, even in its 
most improved state. As early as the year 1501, the payment of tithes 
in the colonies was enjoined, and the mode of it regulated by law. Every 
