It would be deemed presumptuous in one who had spent but three months in a country, if he were to pretend to speak decidedly as to the condition of its inhabitants and character of its government. Little as we saw, nevertheless there are certain broad traits which strike the foreigner immediately, and I believe the correctness of his first impressions is fully substantiated by the experience of all whose position has yielded an occasion of looking at the state of society more closely. My hastily imbibed impressions of the inhabitants of New Spain were far from being favourable either to the people or to the system they have been pleased to adopt for their guide. If I may judge by what I saw and what I learned, I should infer that the barber, whose opinion I have elsewhere mentioned, was in the right, and that, of all countries I had ever seen, New Spain contains the largest proportion of canaille. How few, in that motley population, from the bedizened official of an hour to the lazar sleeping on the steps of the churches, merit any other name.
In the United States, however strong your bias to the opinion, you pause in asserting that the theory of popular self-government can never be reduced to successful practice among the present races of mankind. However strong your secret conviction, that, though circumstances may have there favoured it thus far, it will, however wise and however reasonable in theory, ultimately prove itself inapplicable to man in his fallen state, even in that vaunted instance, there exists, for the time being, so much which would appear to tell in its favour, that you may as well shun the war of words. You feel that you had better hold your tongue and not argue, but let Time, the prover of all things, speak for you. But here in New Spain the case is otherwise; and the same may be said of all its southern neighbours in like positions: the experiment is one of which the madness is evident, and that it has not been, thus far, attended with like evils in the United States, is to be attributed to the difference of lineage, blood, and position; not that the theory is a wise one.
