ernment iſ the missions were reformed; compromised thus in different ways, seeing that in the missions there remained almost illusory my repeated orders and provisions that the converts should be relieved from the cruel and infamous punishments which were arbitrarily applied to them, and enjoy a little their personal liberty and the fruit of their toil, and receive in their schools the elements of a Christian and civil education; when by my own observations and intercourse with missionaries and neophytes — in spite of the flatteries and obstacles urged that I might not remove the yoke from those miserable conquistados — I had formed a definite conception of my duty, I completed a plan reglamentario to take from the missionaries the temporal administration, which I sent to the government secretly, if I remember aright, in 1829, explaining the necessity of proper persons to make surveys, and to establish in due form the new settlements."[1]
At the session of July 20, 1830, Echeandía brought his secularization plan before the diputacion, by which body, after much discussion and some slight modifications, it was approved in the sessions from July 29th to August 3d. This plan provided for the gradual transformation of the missions into pueblos, beginning with those nearest the presidios and pueblos, of which one or two were to be secularized within a year, and the rest as rapidly as experience might show to be practicable. Each neophyte was to have a share of the mission lands and other property. The friars might remain as curates, or establish a new line missions on the gentile frontier as they should choose. The details of the twenty-one articles constituting the document, chiefly devoted to the distribution of property and the local management of the new towns, it seems best to notice, so far as any notice may be required, in a subsequent chapter, in connection with
- ↑ March 19, 1833, E. to Figueroa in St. Pap., Miss. and Col., MS., ii. 42-4. Strange as it may seem, E. makes a full stop in his sentence as above. He then goes on to explain his policy in 1831, of which I shall speak later.
