Page:Mexico (1829) Volumes 1 and 2.djvu/220

182 MEXICO. ceeded to take possession of its most valuable contents. The Marquis was known to have very large sums in specie, con- cealed about the house ; and One of these secret hoards having been discovered, by the treachery of a servant, beneath the floor of a room adjoining the kitchen, one hundred and forty thousand dollars were dug out, and transferred to Mina's military chest. This is the estimate given by Mina's friends, but the Marquis himself made his loss amount to three hun- dred thousand dollars, and such he states it to have been at the present day. But without entering into any controversy as to the amount, the fact of the private property of a Creole nobleman having been seized by Mina, as good and lawful booty, according to his ideas of the laws of war, was univer- sally known, and certainly did not tend to increase the num- ber of his adherents. Most of the great landed proprietors of the country had taken the same line as the Marquis of the Jaral, and not only kept upon terms with the Government, but assisted it by contributions, not voluntarily indeed, but in proportion to the supposed means of each. If this com_ pliance with the requisitions of the Viceroy were construed into an act of positive hostility, there was no security for the property of any one, in the event of Mina"'s success. It was true, indeed, that the Marquis of the Jaral had accepted the rank of Colonel in the Spanish service, and that out of the funds supplied by him, the Government had raised a regi- ment, which bore his name. Still he had taken no active part in the war, and consequently he was one of those, whom Mina professed to have come to defend : he was a Mexican born, and one, too, who held an enormous stake in the coun- try ; and, on all these accounts, the seizure of his property was very generally considered as an unwarrantable act. The success of Mina in the interior of the country was counterbalanced by the loss of the fort which he had erected at Soto la Marina, upon the coast, and which was of impor- tance to him, not only as containing his depot of arms, and