Читать книгу Chata and Chinita. A Novel онлайн

114 страница из 163

These events had followed one another in such rapid succession, and were seemingly so contradictory, that to the onlooker they appeared irrational, childish, even traitorous. But in truth they were the vague, blind outstretchings of a people groping for self-government, for a liberty and peace which they were both by nature and training as yet unprepared to enjoy. The thraldom of Spain had left them madly impatient of fetters, yet they clung to the stake to which they had been chained. Were the prop called King or President, an individual rather than abstruse principles was demanded to uphold them. This it was which in the chaos that followed the war with the United States led them to recall the man whom they had exiled,—the man who had failed them in their greatest need, yet whose unaccountable ascendency over the minds of the masses led them to turn to him again as a deliverer, and whose triumphant march through the land intensified a thousand times the prevailing misery. As one of the historians of Mexico says of Santa Anna,—