_Ramona_ was conceived of, therefore, as a tract, as a piece of propaganda, like Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's _Loveliness_. It was written with passion, flaming hot from a woman's heart--not many have been the romances written in heat. In this one respect it may be likened to Mrs. Stowe's great work, but to call it, as so often it has been called, "the _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ of the Indian," is to speak with inaptness. The book is a romance, and only a romance; its whole appeal is the appeal of romance. She had found at last her background, but it was a background that dominated and destroyed her problem. Unconsciously she surrendered herself to the charm of it until to-day the book is no more a problem novel than is the _House of the Seven Gables_, which also makes use of the excesses and crimes of a system. No background could be more fitted for romance: southern California with its "delicious, languid, semi-tropic summer"; the old Spanish régime, "half barbaric, half elegant, wholly generous and free handed," "when the laws of the Indies were still the law of the land, and its old name, 'New Spain,' was an ever-present link and stimulus";[118] and over it all like a soft, old-world atmosphere the Romish church with its mystery and its medieval splendor. "It was a picturesque life, with more of sentiment and gaiety in it, more also that was truly dramatic, more romance, than will ever be seen again on those sunny shores. The aroma of it all lingers there still."[118] It had been the plan of the author first to elicit strongly the reader's sympathy for Ramona and the Indian Alessandro, then to harrow him with the persecutions wreaked upon them because they were Indians. But the purpose fails from the start. Ramona's Indian blood is not convincing to the reader. Until the story is well under way no one of the characters except the Señora and the priest, not even Ramona herself, suspects that she is not a daughter of the old Spanish house of Ortegna. There was small trace of the Indian about her: her beauty was by no means Indian--steel blue eyes and "just enough olive tint in her complexion to underlie and enrich her skin without making it swarthy." She had been reared as a member of the patriarchal household of the Morenos, and in education and habit of life was as much Spanish as her foster brother Felipe. And Alessandro--even the author explains that Ramona "looked at him with no thought of his being an Indian--a thought there had surely been no need of her having, since his skin was not a shade darker than Felipe's." He is an Indian, we must admit, and yet an Indian who looks like a Spaniard, an Indian who has been educated carefully in the Mission like a priest, an Indian who can sing Latin hymns with marvelous sweetness and play the violin like a master, an Indian with all the characteristics of a courtly señor, more nobly Spanish in soul than even Felipe himself, the heir of the great Moreno