engineers and artillery corps; and Fueros of the army in general. Each of these Fueros exempted those who chose to plead it, from the jurisdiction of the ordinary authorities, and made them amenable, in all civil and criminal causes, to the tribunal of the chief of that corporation, or body, to which they belonged.
In this clash of interests and jurisdictions, the native Americans were usually the sufferers, as it increased the difficulty of obtaining redress in any dispute with an European, who usually enjoyed a double, or triple fuero as a merchant, a government officer, or, at least, as holding some rank in the militia.
The municipal establishments, throughout the New World long retained some vestiges of that spirit of freedom, and that predilection for popular institutions, which Charles V. so effectually quelled in the Peninsula, upon his accession to the throne. We can desire no better proof of the importance originally attached to them, and of the authority with which they were supposed to be invested, than the fact, that Cortez, when desirous to emancipate himself from the jurisdiction of Velasquez, from whom his original commission for the conquest of Mexico emanated, could devise no better method of effecting his purpose, than by forming a Cabildo, or Municipality, for the infant settlement of Veracruz, into whose hands he resigned the commission, which he held of the Governor of Cuba, and from whom he received, in return, authority to act as Generalissimo,
