William Hepworth Dixon, White Conquest: Volume 1

[136] one school at San Jose, a second school at San Francisco, but non-Catholics have fifty schools in these great towns. The Jesuits are training six hundred children in these schools; the rival bodies are training more than twenty thousand children in these towns. Considering how lately the whole population was Catholic and Mexican, and more Catholic than Mexican, the numbers now remaining under Jesuit teaching are assuredly not large.

A greater question still remains: how far have these Jesuits succeeded in their aim of fencing Santa Clara from the world, and raising up an army of their own within her gates?

Enough to lend them hope, but not enough to make them proud. With lads of slow and timid parts, in whom the placid genius of a squaw prevails, they get their way, and hold their own; but youths of quicker pulse and higher heat, in whom the temper of Castille prevails, tear off the withes that bind their weaker brethren, and regain their freedom at a bound. We see examples of the first kind loafing in the play-ground, and an illustration of the second kind in our host, an advocate at San Jose.