Another habit of theirs brings them into contact with the “reasonable people,” not to their advantage.  They are excessively litigious, and their continual law-suits take them to the large towns where the courts of justice are held, and where lawyers’ fees swallow up a large proportion of their savings.  There is a natural connexion between farming and law-suits; and the taste for writs and hard swearing is as remarkable among this agricultural people as it is among our own small farmers in England.

Theoretically, the Indians in their villages live under the general government, like any other citizens; for, since the establishment of the republic, the civil disabilities which had kept them down for three centuries were all abolished at a sweep, and the brown people have their votes, and are eligible for any office.  Practically, these advantages do not come to much at present, for custom, which is stronger than law, keeps them under the government of their own aristocracy, composed of certain families whose nobility dates beyond the Conquest, and was always recognized by the Spaniards.  These noble Indians seem to be pretty much as dirty, as ignorant, and as idle as the plebeians—­the ordinary field-labourers or “earth-hands” (tlalmaitl), as they were called in ancient times,—­and a stranger cannot recognize their claims to superiority by anything in their houses, dress, language, or bearing; nevertheless, they are the patrician families, and republicanism has not yet deprived them of their power over the other Indians.  In early times, when men of white or mixed blood were few in the country, it suited the Spanish government to maintain the authority of these families, who collected the taxes and managed the estates of the little communities.  The common people were the sufferers by this arrangement, for the Alcaldes of their own race cheated them without mercy, and were harder upon them than even their white rulers, just as on slave-estates a black driver is much severer than a white one.

Near some of the houses we noticed that curious institution—­the temazcalli, which corresponds exactly to the Russian vapour-bath.  It is a sort of oven, into which the bather creeps on all fours, and lies down, and the stones at one end are heated by a fire outside.  Upon these stones the bather sprinkles cold water, which fills the place with suffocating steam.  When he feels himself to have been sufficiently sweated, he crawls out again, and has jars of cold water poured over him; whereupon he dresses himself (which is not a long process, as he only wears a shirt and a pair of drawers), and so goes in to supper, feeling much refreshed.  If he would take the cold bath only, and keep the hot one for his clothes, which want it sadly, it would be all the better for him, for the constant indulgence in this enervating luxury weakens him very much.  One would think the bath would make the Indians cleanly in their persons, but it hardly seems so, for they look rather dirtier after they have been in the temazcalli than before, just as the author of A Journey due North says of the Russian peasants.