Tlascala, Vera Cruz, Yucatan, Oajaca, and Alta California, particularly in the last two. In Mexico intendencia they formed two thirds of the population. The castes were most numerous in Guadalajara, Puebla, the north-east provinces, and the mining regions, and the whites mustered in force along the same parallels, where mining and stock-raising presented opportunity for enrichment, and predominated in Nuevo Leon and Sonora. Indeed the sparsely settled north was occupied chiefly by Spaniards and half-breeds, although they assisted to swell the central group of Guanajuato, Puebla, and Mexico, which greatly exceeded the rest in population.[1]
Class distinctions have ever been jealously guarded in Spain, and, proud of his race and country, the Spaniard in early days especially looked upon the foreigner with pity and contempt. These ideas could not fail to become intensified in the New World where he trod the soil as conqueror and master over a dusky and half-naked lace to whom the possession of a soul was at first denied. Under such conditions it is not strange that even in framing the most benevolent of laws the preëminence of the superior people was sustained to the disadvantage of the others. Indeed, the education, wealth, and honors of the country centred almost exclusively in the whites. They held the civil, military, and highest ecclesiastic offices; they filled the professions; they controlled all the leading branches of trade and manufacture, and owned the
- ↑ The excess of females in the large towns, as noticed by Humboldt, is attributable to the influx of domestic servants and the exodus of men for mines and traffic. The evident care with which Navarro prepared his table on population indicates an amount of research that would have given value to comments and speculations on its different items, but his remarks are confined to a few criticisms on Humboldt and to indicating the sources for the figures. The treatise was prepared in 1814 for the body of national representatives and published at Mexico in 1820 as Memoria sobre la Poblacion del Reino de Nueva España, 12mo, 23 pp. with a table. It has been reprinted in Soc. Mex. Geog., Boletin, ii. 75-83. The facts therein are greatly confirmed by the calculations made two years before by Cancelada in his Ruina de la Nueva España, Cádiz, 1811, 12mo, 84 pp. But in this the estimate for towns and mining camps has fallen too low, being placed merely at 55 and 97 respectively.
