PEOPLE OF SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO.
This city of Santa Fé is a queer place, with its lowly homes and high cathedral, with its narrow streets and its broad outlook, with its swarming saloons and sparse schoolhouses, with its hot suns and cool shades, with its dust and donkeys and ditches, with its palace and plaza and pueblos. No city can surpass it either for situation or for apparent lack of progress, for objects of interest that do not grow upon the visitor, or possibilities that excite wonder because they do not develop more rapidly. The oldest city in the country, it can boast of curious ancient buildings and records, and of many specimens of rude art; but of modern life it can show but little. In some respects it is an oriental city. Costumes patterned after those worn in Palestine can be seen on its streets. Pottery that might have been made in Arabia is sold in its stores. Beasts of burden, apparently imported from Barbary, laden with wood, bound like barrels about them, thread its alleys. Complexions swarthy enough to belong to the Bedouins confront you frequently, and women, closely veiled and clothed in black, flit across your path at every corner. The apparent sadness of the native population arrests your attention. Faces more careworn and depressed than those you will see every Sunday thronging the cathedral can hardly be found on earth. The very religion of the people seems to be fearfully pathetic. A stamp of anxiety, such as the Inquisition must have left on the features of the men and women living under its shadow, is a Mexican heritage. The hard conditions of life to which the people are subject may seem to some to account for this strange fact. Yet the more one studies the problem the clearer he will see that their religion does not relieve, but rather intensifies, their apparent misery. It is evidently a kind of religion that does not touch their better natures. It appeals to their fears, enshrouds them in superstitions, stimulates feelings of dread and awe, and offers nothing to their spirit of inquiry. No wonder the pall of hopelessness rests upon their lives. Nor is it strange that under such unnatural conditions vices thrive, ignorance perpetuates itself, the spirit of progress is unattainable, and the people stand in the way of their own prosperity. It will only be when the teacher and the school shall share with the priest and the church the care of the young in New Mexico that better conditions will prevail, a truer life be attained, and the people become a worthy and helpful portion of American society.—The Gleaner.