The colonial régime of Spain was intended and carefully planned to ensure the safety, prosperity and contentment of her distant subjects, but for certain reasons it worked badly. Like all nations of that period, she believed that her colonies existed for the good of the mother-country, and aimed first of all to control and exploit them. She had to depend upon very human agents that were practically beyond her reach. While theoretically all Mexicans, except the aborigines, enjoyed an equality before the law, the government felt that emigrants from the Peninsula were especially worthy of confidence; and at the same time not a few of these men had friends industriously scheming for them at court. The consequences were, first, the establishment of a powerful Gachupine oligarchy, largely dependent on the royal will, the lowest member of which, even if penniless, felt superior to every Creole, and, secondly, the enthronement of privilege, often gained by ignoble means, in government, army, church and business. The Creoles--overawed by the almost divine prestige of the king, trembling before his power, and convinced that only his troops could protect them against the Indians--submitted; but they hated their insolent oppressors, and the Indians hated both groups. On the principle of "Divide and conquer" the government fomented these dissensions; and, supported by the intolerance of the Church, it did its utmost to bar out foreigners and foreign ideas in order to ensure an unreasoning subordination.[1.1] What Mexico owed to Spain, therefore, aside from the remembrance and fruits of an efficiency that she could not hope to equal, was a settled tradition of arbitrary rule based on force, of authority selfishly and often corruptly used, of the government as possessing the sole initiative, of social disunion resulting from privilege and monopoly, of personal successes frequently due to intrigue or purchased favor, of political indifference except among the controlling or aspiring cliques, of apathy concerning all high interests, of ignorance, inertness, fanaticism, hard oppression, blind obedience, passionate feuds and gross pleasures.[2.1] [THE REVOLUTION AGAINST SPAIN]