months to raise that wall, brick upon brick of sun-dried adobe bound with a mortar of mud; savage hearts must have rebelled at the enforced task, which must have appeared unreasonable even in their slow and groping minds; savage hearts must have been broken, savage pride fallen crushed to rise no more, driven by lash and bayonet to this labor of lifting a rampart strong enough to stop an army, against no greater enemy than domestic cattle and murmuring flocks of sheep.
Juan looked at this very Chinese wall of a fence in amazement. It was the first evidence of waste and extravagance he had seen in the building and economy of San Fernando. What a needless expenditure of human force had gone into that wall! What an unfeeling disregard for men driven to labor to this fatuous end! A wall half as high, with a foundation a fourth as broad, would have turned the wildest animal in the mission herds, and there were no others ranging that country that would have any desire to break into a field.
Borromeo had repeated to him Don Geronimo's saying that there was nothing in the world so plentiful and so cheap as human labor, which Juan's devices were all designed to conserve. It required the illustration of this thick broad wall to give him the true valuation of the mayordomo's argument, an unquestionable interpretation of his social and economic ethics. Untempered cruelty was the foundation of that belief, insatiable greed its distorted genius. The padres were blind to its monstrous
