olden times; yet the chains and racks, pincers and charcoal stoves, might be put in operation, none the less cruelly and fatally because in secret. The system has not changed: it is only that the spirit of remonstrance is wanting among its victims. And though the holy fathers, who now lord it over the souls and bodies of the Mexican people, have less frequent occasion to soften the obduracy of stubborn heretics by fire and steel, they find congenial occupation in debaucheries and immoralities indescribable.
The Jesuits were driven from the country, and their estates confiscated, when the yoke of the Spaniards was shaken off; and the interests of the ecclesiastics suffered in some degree from the visitations of the Americans during the war; but the church in Mexico is yet enormously wealthy. It is difficult to name with exactness the sum of its revenues, there being no statistical information on the subject; but it is not too much to estimate the worth of church property in Mexico—consisting of houses, convents, churches, furniture, jewels, and gold and silver vessels—at the sum of a hundred and sixty millions of dollars; exclusive of the annual incomes derived by
