among the half-white Mexicans; while stealing is common to them and the pure Indian population.  We noticed several instances of bigamy, a crime which Mexican law is very severe upon.  As far as we could judge by the amount of punishment inflicted, it is a greater crime to marry two women than to kill two men.  In one gallery are the cells for criminals condemned to death, but the occupants were allowed to mix freely with the rest of the prisoners, and they seemed comfortable enough.

Everybody knows how much in England the condition of a prisoner depends on the disposition of the governor in office and the system in vogue for the moment.  The mere words of his sentence do not indicate at all what his fate will be.  He comes in—­under Sir John—­to light labour, much schoolmaster and chaplain, and the expectation of a ticket-of-leave when a fraction of his time is expired.  All at once Sir James supersedes Sir John, and with him comes in a regime of hard work, short rations, and the black hole.  If he had been “in” a month sooner, he would have been “out” now with those more fortunate criminals, his late companions.

Things ought not to be so in England, but we need hardly wonder at their being still worse in Mexico in this respect as in all others.  There have been twenty changes of government in ten years, and sometimes extreme severity has been the rule, which may change at a day’s notice into the extreme of mildness.  In Santa Ana’s time the utmost rigour of the law prevailed.  Our friends in the Calle Seminario, as they came back from their morning’s ride in the Paseo, had to pass through the great square; and used to see there, day after day, pairs of garotted malefactors sitting bolt upright in the high wooden chairs they had just been executed in, with a frightful calm look on their dead faces.

For the last year or so all this had ceased, and there had scarcely been an execution.  It seems that one principal reason of this lenity is that the government is too weak to support its judges; and that the ministers of justice are actually intimidated by threats mysteriously conveyed to witnesses and authorities, that, if such or such a criminal is executed, his friends have sworn to avenge his death, and are on the look-out, every man with his knife ready.  To political offences the same mercy is extended.  In the early times of the war of independence, and for years afterwards, when one leader caught an officer on the other side, he had him tried by a drum-head court-martial, and shot.  Since then it has come to be better understood that civil war is waged for the benefit of individuals who wish for their turn of power and their pull at the public purse; and the successful leader spares his opponent, not caring to establish a precedent which might prove so very inconvenient to himself.

We were taken to see the garotte by the President, who took it out of its little mahogany case, into which it was fitted like any other surgical instrument.  We noticed that it was rusty, and indeed it had not been used for many months.  It is not worth while to describe it.