LL over the West and Southwest, and particularly in California, we hear much of the wonderful self-sacrifice and devotion of the mission fathers of the Roman Catholic church who established the old missions in California, Arizona and New Mexico and, as their panegyrists claim, "brought the blessings of civilization and Christianity to the poor Indian."

Much has been written of these old days and a glamour of enchantment has been thrown around reality and the facts in the case by the agents of the Roman Catholic church, conscious or unconscious, who have sung without ceasing the virtues of "Father" Junipero Serra and the other mission fathers (?).

This has been taken up by the hotel keepers and others who live on the tourist crop of California and the West, until people have come to believe fiction to be fact.

In Santa Barbara the street railway exploits the Santa Barbara Mission in order to get the nickels from the tourists who go there to see it.

In San Diego the street railroad exploits the twin legend of Ramona and one of its lines bears the sign, "Ramona's Home."

As Ramona was the imaginary heroine of Helen Hunt Jackson's novel of that name and only existed in the brain of the novelist, and as she is a part of the mission system, it can be seen to what

lengths commercialism will go. Then likewise the Santa Fe Railroad (which used to be called "Atchison" in Boston) is exploiting the missions in its advertising with cuts and word paintings as to the romance of the good old days of the missions.

Romances and romancing have characterized the attempt to gloss over the early history of the missions which were surrounded with bloodshed and enslavement of the Indians to whom the "blessings of civilization and Christianity" were brought by these same mission "fathers” (?).

But the time has come to throw off this glamour which the agents of the Roman Catholic church (who are not always Catholics, by the way) and commercialism in various forms have combined to throw over the minds of the American people and seek in the unvarnished history of the past for the real condition of affairs which brought about the degradation and enslavement. of the Indians of the New World, together with the wholesale murder and obliteration of entire tribes, making the treatment of the Indians of the Atlantic seaboard by the English settlers seem like philanthropy by comparison.

Spain and the Spanish Roman Catholic missionary orders domiciled and centering in the City of Mexico were the principal factors in establishing the missions of the Southwest of this

country and in California, and the history of the same must be traced back to the City of Mexico and from there to Hispaniola or Hayti, as it is known today, where Columbus established his first colony and where the first missions were established.

What do we now find in that island of hatred and revolution, whose negro population was brought over at the instigation of Las Casas, the Roman Catholic bishop of Chiapa, who founded that negro slavery in the Western Hemisphere which cost the United States the agony of a civil war with loss of millions of lives and treasure to suppress.

Whether we call it Providence, Fate, Nemesis, or Karma, or whatever name one may call that power which guides human affairs, yet it is a curious fact that the negro slaves brought over to Hispaniola not only revolted and killed their masters and drove out the Spaniards and French, but even changed the name of the island until today there is hardly anything to show where Spain's first colony existed, not even the name.

Within two short years after Hispaniola was settled by Columbus, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica in its article on "Columbus," "five shiploads of Indians were sent off to Seville, Spain, on June 24, 1495, to be sold as slaves, and a tribute was imposed on their fellows which must be looked upon as the origin of that system of repartimientos or encomienda which was afterwards to work such cruel mischief among the conquered."

But the Roman Catholic "fathers" (?) then, as they do now, pretended to come as friends and spiritual advisers until they got the power, and the various mission orders followed the same crafty line of procedure.

Later on when Columbus returned to Hayti, where his principal settlement of, Isabella was, he found that, in order to quell a revolt against his rule, he had to grant such of the opposition chief's followers as chose to remain in the island, repartimientos of land and labor; in other words, land and Indian slaves to work them.

The missions were planted in Hispaniola or Hayti by the Benedictine mission fathers, who made such fine rum under the name of Benedictine cordial, and soon we find them owning vast landed properties and buildings, exempt of course from taxation, as they are today in the United States, and run as money-making institutions like the distillery above mentioned, without much concern as to the physical wellbeing or health of those under the charge of the grasping "fathers."

"Twelve missionaries accompanied the expedition under the orders of Bernard Buil, a Benedictine friar," says the same authority, referring to the second expedition of Columbus in 1493, when they landed in Hayti and soon after were given repartimientos of land and labor.

In other words so many Indian slaves were allotted the gentle mission fathers of Hispaniola who brought the "blessings of civilization and Christianity to the poor Indians," by Columbus, thus compelling them to work in the mines and fields of the missions as they did in California, driven on by the lash so that a million of these Indians, recipients of such blessings, died from a surfeit of these "blessings of civilization and Christianity" brought to them by the mission fathers, in the short period of fifteen years.

In 1508, or fifteen years after the landing of the mission fathers in His paniola or Hayti, the Spaniards, finding the Indians dying off at a frightful rate, unable to stand the terrific tasks imposed on them by their cruel masters, among whom were the mission fathers, at the suggestion of Las Casas, Roman Catholic bishop of Chiapa-the "good Las Casas," as he is called-imported negro slaves from Guinea and laid the foundation of that negro slavery which was to cost us such terrible sacrifices of blood and treasure to eradicate.

Thus the good padres who brought the "blessings of civilization" to the poor Indian also were responsible for those two blots on civilization, negro slavery and the repartimiento or peon

system which existed in Mexico until recent years, bolstered up by all the authority of the Roman Catholic hierarchy who are plotting and scheming against Carranza in Washington today.

In speaking of the Spanish system in America under the heading of "America" the same generally accepted authority, noted for its impartiality,

says:

"Lastly the clergy who were numerous and rich possessed great influence among a superstitious people.

"The vices naturally inherent in this colonial system existed in full force in the Spanish-American possessions. There was tolerable security for all classes except the miserable Indians, who were regarded and treated primarily as beasts of burden, out of whose toil and suffering a provision as ample as possible was to be extracted; first, to supply the wants of the royal treasury and next, to satisfy the cupidity of a shoal of do-nothing public officials and PRIESTS."

These were undoubtedly some of the "blessings of civilization and Christianity" brought by the "good (?) padres" to the poor Indians. These phrases are the usual stock in trade of their panegyrists and this theme is used over and over again ad nauseam.

"The Indians after the conquest were at first slaves" (says the same authority in describing conditions in Mexico and Peru) "they paid a capitation tax to the crown and their labor was entirely at the disposal of their lord" (another "blessing of civilization)." "This system was modified from time to time, but all the changes introduced down to the revolution" (against Spain) "did not relieve them from the state of vassalage." Slaves of the soil like these must indeed have been thankful for the "blessings of civilization and Christianity" brought by the "good padres" as the frequent revolutions testify. In this connection it may be well to say that if one wishes to understand the causes of the frequent revolutions that have racked the South American states and those of the other parts of Latin America, all that is

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necessary is to search for those causes in the endeavors of the people to free themselves from the ecclesiastical tyranny and the endeavor of that ecclesiastical hierarchy to hold the people in spiritual, mental and physical slavery.

"They still continued liable to the performance of compulsory labor, to continue our quotation, under the orders of persons against whom they had no protection." (This included the females.)

"The Memoir of Ulloa, long buried amidst the Spanish archives, with various other documents published since the revolution" (against Spanish rule) "depicts acts of extortion, perfidy, cruelty and oppression practiced upon the Indians which have rarely been paralleled.'

While it has been possible to gloss over many of these events, the butcheries of the Spaniards in Mexico and Peru, where the poor Indians were the victims, were so enormous that history cannot be silent as to the manner in which the "blessings of civilization and Christianity" were brought to these poor people.

In those days California was a part of Mexico, and it may be said that the people who set out from the capital of Mexico and established the chain of missions stretching out from that city in one long unbroken thread were different, and it was only the civilian and the soldier who did these things and inflicted such miseries, while the "good padres" like "Father" Junipero Serra would not stoop to such acts.

If we look at things as they existed then and judge them by the conditions that existed in the city of Mexico before the revolution of Madero it is very unlikely that the barefooted Franciscan friars who founded these missions in California 150 years ago were any better or any cleaner or any different from the swarm of dirty, barefooted vermininfested friars who thronged Mexico City when Diaz in his dotage allowed himself to be guided to his ruin by his religieuse of a wife dominated by the Roman Catholic hierarchy which had

foisted her upon the unsuspecting old man, Mason though he was and expert as he should have been in the wiles of that ecclesiastical political machine, whose proudest motto is "Sempre idem."

Anyone who has traveled in Lower California as the writer has and seen the old missions in all their dirt and squalidness can have but little doubt as to the fact that the conditions existing when the missions were founded were, if anything, worse rather than better than they are today. To him who has seen such there is but little glamour remaining as to what were the actual conditions of things which existed at that time.

As to the purity of motive of the "good padres" let us see what this same unbiased authority, the Encyclopedia Britannica, has to say in the same article:

"Men rose to affluence without salaries and the priests rivaled the laymen in the art of extracting money from those they ought to have protected."

How the "good padres" must have enjoyed bringing "the blessings of civilization and Christianity," and being well paid for so doing.

After Cortez discovered California in 1537, for more than two centuries nothing much is recorded or at least handed down to us that details any successful attempt to colonize what is now the State of California, although there are legends that Spanish miners mined in what is now San Diego County off and on for more than a century before the Franciscans came.

It is generally accepted now that some Franciscan friars or "padres" (Spanish for "fathers") came overland to what is now the hustling modern Anglo-Saxon city of San Diego, Cal., on April 11, 1769, and there were joined in July of that year by "Father" Junipero Serra, who came up from lower California and thus did not found the city of San Diego at all as is claimed by his fullsome advocates and admirers.

While it has generally been claimed that Serra acted with the other Franciscan fathers at the mission of San Diego under the authority of the Order

of St. Francis of the Convent of San Fernando of the city of Mexico and established missions to the number of twenty-one up and down the coast as far north as San Francisco, and from which convent as the central authority they brought the repartimiento or peon system, yet recent historical documents have shown that this central authority was opposed to carrying the blessings of civilization and Christianity and all the other blessings therein included to what is now California. It was only the insistence of the Spanish civil and military officer, Galvez, which forced Junipero Serra and his companions to go forward and do the things for which they are now given credit which does not belong to them, and against. the disapproval of their superiors in the convent.

"The Indians were brought under control and made to serve as laborers,” says the same authority in describing the settlement of California. These were the blessings of civilization.

However, the Indians did not take kindly to these blessings as several times they revolted and massacred many of the dispensers of "civilization and Christianity," the debauching of the women by the Spaniards being not the least of the causes bringing about these revolts.

It is curious how the blessings brought by "dear Father Junipero" were unappreciated by "Lo, the poor Indian whose untutored mind," etc.

Even W. E. Smythe, in his alleged "History of San Diego," page 64, is constrained to admit, in spite of his being one of the foremost panegyrists of "Father" Serra and leading manufacturers of unsubstantial glamour in regard to the missions, that the Indians got the worst of it, for he says:

"But there are many impartial observers who regarded their condition as no better than slavery." Which it was.

Alfred Robinson, in his fascinating book "Life in California," who was a contemporary of the missions and saw them as they were without the glamour of the pseudo romance of later days, said: