Such is a fair picture of California in its worst estate, when the worst and the best of all nations were there congregated, and kept in subjection by the law-abiding spirit of an Anglo-Saxon immigration--a state of society in the first year of its existence, yet infinitely superior to that existing in the city of Mexico a hundred years after the discovery of the mines of Haxal and Pachuca. But we may complete the contrast by adding the more deplorable part of the picture which Friar Thomas Gage has drawn. "It seems," says he, "that religion teaches that all wickedness is allowable, so that the churches and clergy flourish. Nay, while the purse is open to lasciviousness, if it be likewise open to enrich the temple walls and roofs, this is better than any holy water, or water to wash away the filth of the other. Rome is held to be the head of superstition; and what stately churches, chapels, and cloisters are in it! What fastings, what processions, what appearances of devotion! And, on the other side, what liberty, what profaneness, what whoredoms, nay, what sins of Sodom are committed in it, insomuch that it could be the saying of a friar to myself, while I was in it, that he verily thought there was no one city in the world wherein were more Atheists than in Rome. I might show this much in Madrid, Seville, Valladolid, and other famous cities in Spain and in Italy; in Milan, Genoa, and Naples; relating many instances of scandals committed in those places, and yet the temples are mightily enriched by those who have thought their alms a sufficient warrant to free them from hell and purgatory. But I must return to Mexico, which furnishes a thousand witnesses of this truth--sin and wickedness abounding in it--and yet no such people in the world toward the Church and clergy. In their lifetime they strive to excel one another in their gifts to the cloisters of nuns and friars, some erecting altars to their best-devoted saints, worth many thousand ducats, others presenting crowns of gold to the pictures of Mary, others lamps, others golden chains, others building cloisters at their own charge, others repairing them, others, at their death, leaving to them two or three thousand ducats for an annual stipend. MEXICO TWO CENTURIES AGO.