one what will then become of them. Ignorance and bigotry, like other
insanities, are incapable of self-government. They will fall under military
despotism, and become the murderous tools of their respective Bonapartes.
No one I hope can doubt my wish to see them and all mankind exercising
self-government. But the question is not what we wish--but what is
practicable. As their sincere friend, then, I do believe the best thing
for them would be to come to an accord with Spain, under the guarantee of
France, Russia, Holland, and the United States, allowing to Spain a nominal
supremacy, with authority only to keep the peace among them, leaving them
otherwise all the powers of self-government, until their experience, their
education, and their emancipation from their Priests should prepare them
for complete independence." Jefferson's works, vol. 4, page 303. Mr.
Jefferson well knew that from the discovery of America to the date of his
letter, the Mexicans had unfortunately been the persecuted, pillaged, and
priest-ridden slaves of the kings of Spain--a line of kings, with but
few exceptions, more inimical to the rights of man, more opposed to the
advancement of truth, and light, and liberty, more practised in tyranny,
more hardened in crime, more infatuated with superstition, and more
benighted with ignorance, than any other monsters that ever disgraced
a throne in christendom, since the revival of letters. Yes, humanity
shudders, and freedom burns with indignation at a recital of the
barbarities and oppressions practised upon the ill-fated Mexicans from the
bloody days of Cortes up to the termination of their connexion with Spain.
The produce of their cultivated fields was rifled--the natural products of
their forests pillaged--the bowels of their earth ransacked, and their
suffering families impoverished to glut the grandeur and enrich the coffers
of their trans-Atlantic oppressors. To make their miserable servitude less
perceptible, they were denied the benefits of the commonest education,
and were kept the blind devotees of the darkest and most demoralizing
superstition that ever clouded the intellects, or degraded the morals