ious "orders" and houses. The national Government, however, does not appear to have derived any great fiscal advantage from the confiscation of the Church property, or to have availed itself of the resources which thus came to it for effecting any marked reduction of the national debt Good Catholics would not buy "God's property" and take titles from the state; and so large tracts of land and blocks of city buildings passed, at a very low figure, into the possession of those who were indifferent to the Church, and had command of ready money; and in this way individuals, rather than the state and the great body of the people, have been benefited.
note.—An official report by the Mexican Government in 1879 thus reviews the progress of foreign (Protestant) missions in Mexico, and constitutes in itself a striking evidence of the marvelous change which has taken place in Mexico within the last quarter of a century in respect to religious belief and toleration. It says: "The Mexican nation was for a long time dominated by the Roman Catholic clergy, which came to establish the most absolute fanaticism, and the most complete intolerance. Not only was the exercise of any other religion save that of the apostolic Roman Catholic faith not permitted, but for a long time the Inquisition prevailed, with all its horrors, and all those not professing the Roman Catholic faith were considered as men without principle or morality. The exercise of any other worship, and, still more, the propagation of any other religion except the Roman Catholic, would have occasioned in Mexico, up to a little more than twenty years ago, the death of any one attempting to undertake such an enterprise; inasmuch as it was considered an act meritorious in the eyes of the Divinity, the extermination of those who pretended to make proselytes in pro of any other religion. Although the conquests obtained through the war of reform have effected a notable change in intelli-
