of Spanish descent are comparatively few, this being noted especially by
Spanish visitors to California.

But what of Spanish generosity at home, when the missionaries were
toiling for souls in the New World? Many a pious Spaniard in Spain and
in Mexico subscribed immense sums for the missions of California, both
for the Jesuit and the Franciscan missions. Thus we find the pious
Marquis de Villa Puente subscribing $200,000 for "missions, vessels and
other necessities of California." The Duchess of Gandia subscribed
$60,000 for the same purpose in 1767 and many others followed the same
example until the "Pius Fund of the Missions of California" amounted to
over two million dollars. At the time of the Secularization of the
Missions, the Mexican Government confiscated a large remaining portion
of this "Pious Fund." In 1853 the Spanish Archbishop Alemany, then
Bishop of Monterey and successor of Bishop Diego from whom the "Pious
Fund" had been taken, started a litigation which was continued in turn
by his worthy successor Archbishop Patrick Riordan of the archdiocese of
San Francisco, with the good result that Mexico was made to pay the sum
of $43,050 in Mexican currency annually as the interest at six per cent
on the sum of $1,460,682 of the "Pious Fund" which the national treasury
of Mexico had appropriated on the promise of Mexico to act as trustee of
the fund and pay an interest of six per cent which it had failed to pay
since its appropriation at the time of the Mexican regime in California.
Moreover, Mexico had agreed to pay this interest to the object intended
by the donors of the fund, namely, "to the church, for the conversion of
the natives of California, for the establishment, maintenance and
extension of the Catholic Church, her faith and worship, in said country
of Upper and Lower California." The litigation was won through the
intervention of the United States Government which Archbishop Riordan
invoked through his counsel, and decided by arbitrators under the Hague