Viva Mexico! by Charles Flandrau & Nicholas Shakespeare

Author:Charles Flandrau & Nicholas Shakespeare
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9781780600048
Publisher: Eland Publishing
Published: 2012-07-31T07:00:00+00:00

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ONCE, IN THE UNITED STATES I had to wait five hours for a train in a large prohibition town – a town that for many years has been a bright jewel in the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union’s crown of glory. As I was ignorant of this fact at the time, I asked one of the intellectual-looking waitresses at the hotel where I was eating my luncheon to bring me a bottle of beer. From the manner in which she snubbed me, I supposed the fair, pure city not only did not tolerate beer, but did not tolerate even the mention of beer. After luncheon, while I was sitting on the hotel piazza, I noticed that a great many men darted into an alley just opposite, passed through a doorway and never returned. As the hour grew later their numbers increased until the door was held open by an almost continuous stream. At times the room beyond the door apparently became so crowded that the men in the alley would form a long queue and patiently await their turn to enter. Thinking it might be a show of some sort, I made enquiries of a policeman, who, much amused at my innocence, replied: ‘Didn’t you ever see a man take a drink before?’ Hundreds of men went in at the door during the afternoon and emerged, it seemed, from a smug-looking grocery store on another street. And everybody was satisfied: the good ladies of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, who apparently can always be appeased by a bit of legislation; the inhabitants of the town, who drank as deep and as often as they pleased. I was young at the time, and although I have since discovered with much amusement and some gratification that the law which prevents a man from obtaining a drink, when he really wants one, has yet to be devised, the incident made a lasting impression on me. I often recall my afternoon in the State of Maine, the alley, the little door, the stream of men of every station in life.

In Mexico I have recalled it time and again, as I gradually learned something about the theoretical and the actual relations between the state and the Church. For there is, on the one hand, precisely the same stern attitude of the state towards religion (which in Mexico really means Roman Catholicism), and on the other the same official wink. In 1859 the great Benito Juarez proclaimed his highly desirable Reform Laws, and in so doing simply wiped from the slate the various complications that had kept the clerical party and the liberal party, from one end of the country to the other, in a state of bloody war for fifty years. At one time every public institution in Mexico was owned and managed by the Church. Every hospital, every school, every asylum was Church property. Even some of the theatres were of religious origin. So great a portion of the country’s wealth was in the hands of the priests that trade of all kinds was seriously hindered.

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