[Footnote 83: Somewhat on the same principle that in mediaeval Europe led an earl or count, commanding an exposed border district or march to rise in power and importance and become a "margrave" [mark + graf = march-count] or "marquis." Compare the increase of sovereignty accorded to the earls of Chester and bishops of Durham as rulers of the two principal march counties of England.]

[Sidenote: The "Long House."]

Such was the famous confederacy of the Iroquois. They called it the Long House, and by this name as commonly as any other it is known in history. The name by which they called themselves was Hodenosaunee, or "People of the Long House." The name was picturesquely descriptive of the long and narrow strip of villages with its western outlook toward the Niagara, and its eastern toward the Hudson, three hundred miles distant. But it was appropriate also for another and a deeper reason than this. We have seen that in its social and political structure, from top to bottom and from end to end, the confederacy was based upon and held together by the gentes, clans, communal households, or "long houses," which were its component units. They may be compared to the hypothetical indestructible atoms of modern physics, whereof all material objects are composed. The whole institutional fabric was the outgrowth of the group of ideas and habits that belong to a state of society ignorant of and incapable of imagining any other form of organization than the clan held together by the tie of a common maternal ancestry. The house architecture was as much a constituent part of the fabric as the council of sachems. There is a transparency about the system that is very different from the obscurity we continually find in Europe and Asia, where different strata of ideas and institutions have been superimposed one upon another and crumpled and distorted with as little apparent significance or purpose as the porches and gables of a so-called "Queen Anne" house.[84] Conquest in the Old World has resulted in the commingling and manifold fusion of peoples in very different stages of development. In the New World there has been very little of that sort of thing. Conquest in ancient America was pretty much all of the Iroquois type, entailing in its milder form the imposition of tribute, in its more desperate form the extermination of a tribe with the adoption of its remnants into the similarly-constituted tribe of the conquerors. There was therefore but little modification of the social structure while the people, gradually acquiring new arts, were passing through savagery and into a more or less advanced stage of barbarism. The symmetry of the structure and the relation of one institution to another is thus distinctly apparent.

[Footnote 84: For instance, the whole discussion in Gomme's Village Community, London, 1890, an excellent book, abounds with instances of this crumpling.]

The communal household and the political structure built upon it, as above described in the case of the Iroquois, seem to have existed all over ancient North America, with agreement in fundamental characteristics and variation in details and degree of development. There are many corners as yet imperfectly explored, but hitherto, in so far as research has been rewarded with information, it all points in the same general direction. Among the tribes above enumerated as either in savagery or in the lower status of barbarism, so far as they have been studied, there seems to be a general agreement, as to the looseness of the marriage tie the clan with descent in the female line, the phratry, the tribe, the officers and councils, the social equality, the community in goods (with exceptions already noted), and the wigwam or house adapted to communal living.



[Sidenote: Circular houses of the Mandans.]

The extreme of variation consistent with adherence to the common principle was to be found in the shape and material of the houses. Those of the savage tribes were but sorry huts. The long house was used by the Powhatans and other Algonquin tribes. The other most highly developed type may be illustrated by the circular frame-houses of the Mandans.[85] These houses were from forty to sixty feet in diameter. A dozen or more posts, each about eight inches in diameter, were set in the ground, "at equal distances in the circumference of a circle, and rising about six feet above the level of the floor." The tops of the posts were connected by horizontal stringers; and outside each post a slanting wooden brace sunk in the ground about four feet distant served as a firm support to the structure. The spaces between these braces were filled by tall wooden slabs, set with the same slant and resting against the stringers. Thus the framework of the outer wall was completed. To support the roof four posts were set in the ground about ten feet apart in the form of a square, near the centre of the building. They were from twelve to fifteen feet in height, and were connected at the top by four stringers forming a square. The rafters rested upon these stringers and upon the top of the circular wall below. The rafters were covered with willow matting, and upon this was spread a layer of prairie grass. Then both wall and roof, from the ground up to the summit, were covered with earth, solid and hard, to a thickness of at least two feet. The rafters projected above the square framework at the summit, so as to leave a circular opening in the centre about four feet in diameter. This hole let in a little light, and let out some of the smoke from the fire which blazed underneath in a fire-pit lined with stone slabs set on edge. The only other aperture for light was the doorway, which was a kind of vestibule or passage some ten feet in length. Curtains of buffalo robes did duty instead of doors. The family compartments were triangles with base at the outer wall, and apex opening upon the central hearth; and the partitions were hanging mats or skins, which were tastefully fringed and ornamented with quill-work and pictographs.[86] In the lower Mandan village, visited by Catlin, there were about fifty such houses, each able to accommodate from thirty to forty persons. The village, situated upon a bold bluff at a bend of the Missouri river, and surrounded by a palisade of stout timbers more than ten feet in height, was very strong for defensive purposes. Indeed, it was virtually impregnable to Indian methods of attack, for the earth-covered houses could not be set on fire by blazing arrows, and just within the palisade ran a trench in which the defenders could securely skulk, while through the narrow chinks between the timbers they could shoot arrows fast enough to keep their assailants at a distance. This purpose was further secured by rude bastions, and considering the structure as a whole one cannot help admiring the ingenuity which it exhibits. It shows a marked superiority over the conceptions of military defence attained by the Iroquois or any other Indians north of New Mexico. Besides the communal houses the village contained its "medicine lodge," or council house, and an open area for games and ceremonies. In the spaces between the houses were the scaffolds for drying maize, buffalo meat, etc., ascended by well-made portable ladders. Outside the village, at a short distance on the prairie, was a group of such scaffolds upon which the dead were left to moulder, somewhat after the fashion of the Parsees.[87]

[Footnote 85: Morgan, Houses and House-life, pp. 126-129; Catlin's North Amer. Indians, i. 81 ff.]

[Footnote 86: Catlin, i. 83.]

[Footnote 87: Catlin, i. 90.]

* * * * *

[Sidenote: The Indians of the pueblos,—in the middle status of barbarism.]

We are now prepared to understand some essential points in the life of the groups of Indians occupying the region of the Cordilleras, both north and south of the Isthmus of Darien, all the way from Zuni to Quito. The principal groups are the Moquis and Zunis of Arizona and New Mexico, the Nahuas or Nahuatlac tribes of Mexico, the Mayas, Quiches, and kindred peoples of Central America; and beyond the isthmus, the Chibchas of New Granada, and sundry peoples comprised within the domain of the Incas. With regard to the ethnic relationships of these various groups, opinion is still in a state of confusion; but it is not necessary for our present purpose that we should pause to discuss the numerous questions thus arising. Our business is to get a clear notion in outline of the character of the culture to which these peoples had attained at the time of the Discovery. Here we observe, on the part of all, a very considerable divergence from the average Indian level which we have thus far been describing.

This divergence increases as we go from Zuni toward Cuzco, reaching its extreme, on the whole, among the Peruvians, though in some respects the nearest approach to civilization was made by the Mayas. All these peoples were at least one full ethnical period nearer to true civilization than the Iroquois,—and a vast amount of change and improvement is involved in the conception of an entire ethnical period. According to Mr. Morgan, one more such period would have brought the average level of these Cordilleran peoples to as high a plane as that of the Greeks described in the Odyssey. Let us now observe the principal points involved in the change, bearing in mind that it implies a considerable lapse of time. While the date 1325, at which the city of Mexico was founded, is the earliest date in the history of that country which can be regarded as securely established, it was preceded by a long series of generations of migration and warfare, the confused and fragmentary record of which historians have tried—hitherto with scant success—to unravel. To develop such a culture as that of the Aztecs out of an antecedent culture similar to that of the Iroquois must of course have taken a long time.

[Sidenote: Horticulture with irrigation, and architecture with adobe.]

It will be remembered that the most conspicuous distinctive marks of the grade of culture attained by the Cordilleran peoples were two,—the cultivation of maize in large quantities by irrigation, and the use of adobe-brick or stone in building. Probably there was at first, to some extent, a causal connection between the former and the latter. The region of the Moqui-Zuni culture is a region in which arid plains become richly fertile when water from neighbouring cliffs or peaks is directed down upon them. It is mainly an affair of sluices, not of pump or well, which seem to have been alike beyond the ken of aboriginal Americans of whatever grade. The change of occupation involved in raising large crops of corn by the aid of sluices would facilitate an increase in density of population, and would encourage a preference for agricultural over predatory life. Such changes would be likely to favour the development of defensive military art. The Mohawk's surest defence lay in the terror which his prowess created hundreds of miles away. One can easily see how the forefathers of our Moquis and Zunis may have come to prefer the security gained by living more closely together and building impregnable fortresses.

[Sidenote: Possible origin of adobe architecture.]

The earthen wall of the Mandan, supported on a framework of posts and slabs, seems to me curiously and strikingly suggestive of the incipient pottery made by surrounding a basket with a coating of clay.[88] When it was discovered how to make the earthen bowl or dish without the basket, a new era in progress was begun. So when it was discovered that an earthen wall could be fashioned to answer the requirements of house-builders without the need of a permanent wooden framework, another great step was taken. Again the consequences were great enough to make it mark the beginning of a new ethnical period. If we suppose the central portion of our continent, the Mississippi and Missouri valleys, to have been occupied at some time by tribes familiar with the Mandan style of building; and if we further suppose a gradual extension or migration of this population, or some part of it, westward into the mountain region; that would be a movement into a region in which timber was scarce, while adobe clay was abundant. Under such circumstances the useful qualities of that peculiar clay could not fail to be soon discovered. The simple exposure to sunshine would quickly convert a Mandan house built with it into an adobe house; the coating of earth would become a coating of brick. It would not then take long to ascertain that with such adobe-brick could be built walls at once light and strong, erect and tall, such as could not be built with common clay. In some such way as this I think the discovery must have been made by the ancestors of the Zunis, and others who have built pueblos. After the pueblo style of architecture, with its erect walls and terraced stories, had become developed, it was an easy step, when the occasion suggested it, to substitute for the adobe-brick coarse rubble-stones embedded in adobe. The final stage was reached in Mexico and Yucatan, when soft coralline limestone was shaped into blocks with a flint chisel and laid in courses with adobe-mortar.

[Footnote 88: See above, p. 25.]

[Sidenote: Mr. Cushing at Zuni.]

The pueblos of New Mexico and Arizona are among the most interesting structures in the world. Several are still inhabited by the descendants of the people who were living in them at the time of the Spanish Discovery, and their primitive customs and habits of thought have been preserved to the present day with but little change. The long sojourn of Mr. Cushing, of the Bureau of Ethnology, in the Zuni pueblo, has already thrown a flood of light upon many points in American archaeology.[89] As in the case of American aborigines generally, the social life of these people is closely connected with their architecture, and the pueblos which are still inhabited seem to furnish us with the key to the interpretation of those that we find deserted or in ruins, whether in Arizona or in Guatemala.

[Footnote 89: See his articles in the Century Magazine, Dec., 1882, Feb., 1883, May, 1883; and his papers on "Zuni Fetiches," Reports of the Bureau of Ethnology, ii. 9-45; "A Study of Pueblo Pottery as Illustrative of Zuni Culture Growth," id. iv. 473-521; see also Mrs. Stevenson's paper, "Religious Life of a Zuni Child," id. v. 539-555; Sylvester Baxter, "An Aboriginal Pilgrimage," Century Magazine, Aug., 1882.]



[Sidenote: Typical structure of the pueblo.]

In the architecture of the pueblos one typical form is reproduced with sundry variations in detail. The typical form is that of a solid block of buildings making three sides of an extensive rectangular enclosure or courtyard. On the inside, facing upon the courtyard, the structure is but one story in height; on the outside, looking out upon the surrounding country, it rises to three, or perhaps even five or six stories. From inside to outside the flat roofs rise in a series of terraces, so that the floor of the second row is continuous with the roof of the first, the floor of the third row is continuous with the roof of the second, and so on. The fourth side of the rectangle is formed by a solid block of one-story apartments, usually with one or two narrow gateways overlooked by higher structures within the enclosure. Except these gateways there is no entrance from without; the only windows are frowning loop-holes, and access to the several apartments is gained through skylights reached by portable ladders. Such a structure is what our own forefathers would have naturally called a "burgh," or fortress; it is in one sense a house, yet in another sense a town;[90] its divisions are not so much houses as compartments; it is a joint-tenement affair, like the Iroquois long houses, but in a higher stage of development.

[Footnote 90: Cf. [Greek: oikos], "house," with Latin vicus, "street" or "village," Sanskrit vesa, "dwelling-place," English wick, "mansion" or "village."]



[Sidenote: Pueblo society.]

So far as they have been studied, the pueblo Indians are found to be organized in clans, with descent in the female line, as in the case of the ruder Indians above described. In the event of marriage the young husband goes to live with his wife, and she may turn him out of doors if he deserves it.[91] The ideas of property seem still limited to that of possessory right, with the ultimate title in the clan, except that portable articles subject to individual ownership have become more numerous. In government the council of sachems reappears with a principal sachem, or cacique, called by the Spaniards "gobernador." There is an organized priesthood, with distinct orders, and a ceremonial more elaborate than those of the ruder Indians. In every pueblo there is to be found at least one "estufa," or council-house, for governmental or religious transactions. Usually there are two or three or more such estufas. In mythology, in what we may call pictography or rudimentary hieroglyphics, as well as in ordinary handicrafts, there is a marked advance beyond the Indians of the lower status of barbarism, after making due allowances for such things as the people of the pueblos have learned from white men.[92]

[Footnote 91: "With the woman rests the security of the marriage ties; and it must be said, in her high honour, that she rarely abuses the privilege; that is, never sends her husband 'to the home of his fathers,' unless he richly deserves it." But should not Mr. Cushing have said "home of his mothers," or perhaps, of "his sisters and his cousins and his aunts?" For a moment afterward he tells us, "To her belong all the children; and descent, including inheritance, is on her side." Century Magazine, May, 1883, p. 35.]

[Footnote 92: For example, since the arrival of the Spaniards some or perhaps all of the pueblos have introduced chimneys into their apartments; but when they were first visited by Coronado, he found the people wearing cotton garments, and Franciscan friars in 1581 remarked upon the superior quality of their shoes. In spinning and weaving, as well as in the grinding of meal, a notable advance had been made.]



[Sidenote: Wonderful ancient pueblos in the Chaco valley.]

[Sidenote: The Moqui pueblos.]

[Sidenote: The cliff pueblos.]

From the pueblos still existing, whether inhabited or in ruins, we may eventually get some sort of clue to the populations of ancient towns visited by the Spanish discoverers.[93] The pueblo of Zuni seems to have had at one time a population of 5,000, but it has dwindled to less than 2,000. Of the ruined pueblos, built of stone with adobe mortar, in the valley of the Rio Chaco, the Pueblo Hungo Pavie contained 73 apartments in the first story, 53 in the second, and 29 in the third, with an average size of 18 feet by 13; and would have accommodated about 1,000 Indians. In the same valley Pueblo Bonito, with four stories, contained not less than 640 apartments, with room enough for a population of 3,000; within a third of a mile from this huge structure stood Pueblo Chettro Kettle, with 506 apartments. The most common variation from the rectangular shape was that in which a terraced semicircle was substituted for the three terraced sides, as in Pueblo Bonito, or the whole rectangular design was converted into an ellipse, as in Pueblo Penasca Blanca. There are indications that these fortresses were not in all cases built at one time, but that, at least in some cases, they grew by gradual accretions.[94] The smallness of the distances between those in the Chaco valley suggests that their inhabitants must have been united in a confederation; and one can easily see that an actual juxtaposition or partial coalescence of such communities would have made a city of very imposing appearance. The pueblos are always found situated near a river, and their gardens, lying outside, are easily accessible to sluices from neighbouring cliffs or mesas. But in some cases, as the Wolpi pueblo of the Moquis, the whole stronghold is built upon the summit of the cliff; there is a coalescence of communal structures, each enclosing a courtyard, in which there is a spring for the water-supply; and the irrigated gardens are built in terrace-form just below on the bluff, and protected by solid walls. From this curious pueblo another transition takes us to the extraordinary cliff-houses found in the Chelly, Mancos, and McElmo canons, and elsewhere,—veritable human eyries perched in crevices or clefts of the perpendicular rock, accessible only by dint of a toilsome and perilous climb; places of refuge, perhaps for fragments of tribes overwhelmed by more barbarous invaders, yet showing in their dwelling-rooms and estufas marks of careful building and tasteful adornment.[95]

[Footnote 93: At least a better one than Mr. Prescott had when he naively reckoned five persons to a household, Conquest of Mexico, ii. 97.]

[Footnote 94: Morgan, Houses and House-Life, chap. vii.]

[Footnote 95: For careful descriptions of the ruined pueblos and cliff-houses, see Nadaillac's Prehistoric America, chap. v., and Short's North Americans of Antiquity, chap. vii. The latter sees in them the melancholy vestiges of a people gradually "succumbing to their unpropitious surroundings—a land which is fast becoming a howling wilderness, with its scourging sands and roaming savage Bedouin—the Apaches."]

[Sidenote: Pueblo of Zuni.]

The pueblo of Zuni is a more extensive and complex structure than the ruined pueblos on the Chaco river. It is not so much an enormous communal house as a small town formed of a number of such houses crowded together, with access from one to another along their roof-terraces. Some of the structures are of adobe brick, others of stone embedded in adobe mortar and covered with plaster. There are two open plazas or squares in the town, and several streets, some of which are covered ways passing beneath the upper stories of houses. The effect, though not splendid, must be very picturesque, and would doubtless astonish and bewilder visitors unprepared for such a sight. When Coronado's men discovered Zuni in 1540, although that style of building was no longer a novelty to them, they compared the place to Granada.

[Sidenote: Pueblo of Tlascala.]

Now it is worthy of note that Cortes made the same comparison in the case of Tlascala, one of the famous towns at which he stopped on his march from Vera Cruz to the city of Mexico. In his letter to the emperor Charles V., he compared Tlascala to Granada, "affirming that it was larger, stronger, and more populous than the Moorish capital at the time of the conquest, and quite as well built."[96] Upon this Mr. Prescott observes, "we shall be slow to believe that its edifices could have rivalled those monuments of Oriental magnificence, whose light aerial forms still survive after the lapse of ages, the admiration of every traveller of sensibility and taste. The truth is that Cortes, like Columbus, saw objects through the warm medium of his own fond imagination, giving them a higher tone of colouring and larger dimensions than were strictly warranted by the fact." Or, as Mr. Bandelier puts it, when it comes to general statements about numbers and dimensions, "the descriptions of the conquerors cannot be taken as facts, only as the expression of feelings, honestly entertained but uncritical." From details given in various Spanish descriptions, including those of Cortes himself, it is evident that there could not have been much difference in size between Tlascala and its neighbour Cholula. The population of the latter town has often been given as from 150,000 to 200,000; but, from elaborate archaeological investigations made on the spot in 1881, Mr. Bandelier concludes that it cannot have greatly exceeded 30,000, and this number really agrees with the estimates of two very important Spanish authorities, Las Casas and Torquemada, when correctly understood.[97] We may therefore suppose that the population of Tlascala was about 30,000. Now the population of the city of Granada, at the time of its conquest by Ferdinand and Isabella, is said by the greatest of Spanish historians[98] to have been about 200,000. It would thus appear that Cortes sometimes let his feelings run away with him; and, all things considered, small blame to him if he did! In studying the story of the Spanish conquest of America, liberal allowance must often be made for inaccuracies of statement that were usually pardonable and sometimes inevitable.

[Footnote 96: "La qual ciudad ... es muy mayor que Granada, y muy mas fuerte, y de tan buenos edificios, y de mucha mas gente, que Granada tenia al tiempo que se gano." Cortes, Relacion segunda al Emperador, ap. Lorenzana, p. 58, cited in Prescott's Conquest of Mexico, vol. i. p. 401 (7th ed., London, 1855).]

[Footnote 97: See Bandelier's Archaeological Tour in Mexico, Boston, 1885, pp. 160-164. Torquemada's words, cited by Bandelier, are "Quando entraron los Espanoles, dicen que tenia mas de quarenta mil vecinos esta ciudad." Monarquia Indiana, lib. iii. cap. xix. p. 281. A prolific source of error is the ambiguity in the word vecinos, which may mean either "inhabitants" or "householders." Where Torquemada meant 40,000 inhabitants, uncritical writers fond of the marvellous have understood him to mean 40,000 houses, and multiplying this figure by 5, the average number of persons in a modern family, have obtained the figure 200,000. But 40,000 houses peopled after the old Mexican fashion, with at least 200 persons in a house (to put it as low as possible), would make a city of 8,000,000 inhabitants! Las Casas, in his Destruycion de las Indias, vii., puts the population of Cholula at about 30,000. I observe that Llorente (in his Oeuvres de Las Casas, tom. i. p. 38) translates the statement correctly. I shall recur to this point below, vol. ii. p. 264.]

[Footnote 98: Mariana, Historia de Espana, Valencia, 1795, tom. viii. p. 317.]

But when Cortes described Tlascala as "quite as well built" as Granada, it is not at all likely that he was thinking about that exquisite Moorish architecture which in the mind of Mr. Prescott or any cultivated modern writer is the first thing to be suggested by the name. The Spaniards of those days did not admire the artistic work of "infidels;" they covered up beautiful arabesques with a wash of dirty plaster, and otherwise behaved very much like the Puritans who smashed the "idolatrous" statues in English cathedrals. When Cortes looked at Tlascala, and Coronado looked at Zuni, and both soldiers were reminded of Granada, they were probably looking at those places with a professional eye as fortresses hard to capture; and from this point of view there was doubtless some justice in the comparison.

[Sidenote: The ancient city of Mexico was a great composite pueblo.]

In the description of Tlascala by the Spaniards who first saw it, with its dark and narrow streets, its houses of adobe, or "the better sort" of stone laid in adobe mortar, and its flat and terraced roofs, one is irresistibly reminded of such a pueblo as Zuni. Tlascala was a town of a type probably common in Mexico. In some respects, as will hereafter appear, the city of Mexico showed striking variations from the common type. Yet there too were to be seen the huge houses, with terraced roofs, built around a square courtyard; in one of them 450 Spaniards, with more than 1,000 Tlascalan allies, were accommodated; in another, called "Montezuma's palace," one of the conquerors, who came several times intending to see the whole of it, got so tired with wandering through the interminable succession of rooms that at length he gave it up and never saw them all.[99] This might have happened in such a building as Pueblo Bonito; and a suspicion is raised that Montezuma's city was really a vast composite pueblo, and that its so-called palaces were communal buildings in principle like the pueblos of the Chaco valley.

[Footnote 99: "Et io entrai piu di quattro volte in una casa del gran Signor non por altro effetto che per vederla, et ogni volta vi camminauo tanto che mi stancauo, et mai la fini di vedere tutta." Relatione fatta per un gentil' huomo del Signor Fernando Cortese, apud Ramusio, Navigationi et Viaggi, Venice, 1556, tom. iii. fol. 309.]

[Sidenote: Natural mistake of the Spanish discoverers.]

[Sidenote: Contrast between feudalism and gentilism.]

[Sidenote: Change from gentile society to political society.]

Of course the Spanish discoverers could not be expected to understand the meaning of what they saw. It dazed and bewildered them. They knew little or nothing of any other kind of society than feudal monarchy, and if they made such mistakes as to call the head war-chief a "king" (i. e. feudal king) or "emperor," and the clan-chiefs "lords" or "noblemen," if they supposed that these huge fortresses were like feudal castles and palaces in Europe, they were quite excusable. Such misconceptions were common enough before barbarous societies had been much studied; and many a dusky warrior, without a tithe of the pomp and splendour about him that surrounded Montezuma, has figured in the pages of history as a mighty potentate girt with many of the trappings of feudalism.[100] Initial misconceptions that were natural enough, indeed unavoidable, found expression in an absurdly inappropriate nomenclature; and then the use of wrong names and titles bore fruit in what one cannot properly call a theory but rather an incoherent medley of notions about barbaric society. Nothing could be further from feudalism, in which the relation of landlord and tenant is a fundamental element, than the society of the American aborigines, in which that relation was utterly unknown and inconceivable. This more primitive form of society is not improperly called gentilism, inasmuch as it is based upon the gens or clan, with communism in living, and with the conception of individual ownership of property undeveloped. It was gentilism that everywhere prevailed throughout the myriads of unrecorded centuries during which the foremost races of mankind struggled up through savagery and barbarism into civilization, while weaker and duller races lagged behind at various stages on the way. The change from "gentile" society to political society as we know it was in some respects the most important change that has occurred in human affairs since men became human. It might be roughly defined as the change from personal to territorial organization. It was accomplished when the stationary clan became converted into the township, and the stationary tribe into the small state;[101] when the conception of individual property in land was fully acquired; when the tie of physical kinship ceased to be indispensable as a bond for holding a society together; when the clansman became a citizen. This momentous change was accomplished among the Greeks during a period beginning shortly before the first Olympiad (B. C. 776), and ending with the reforms of Kleisthenes at Athens (B. C. 509); among the Romans it was accomplished by the series of legislative changes beginning with those ascribed to Servius Tullius (about B. C. 550), and perfected by the time of the first Punic War (B. C. 264-241). In each case about three centuries was required to work the change.[102] If now the reader, familiar with European history, will reflect upon the period of more than a thousand years which intervened between the date last named and the time when feudalism became thoroughly established, if he will recall to mind the vast and powerful complication of causes which operated to transform civil society from the aspect which it wore in the days of Regulus and the second Ptolemy to that which it had assumed in the times of Henry the Fowler or Fulk of Anjou, he will begin to realize how much "feudalism" implies, and what a wealth of experience it involves, above and beyond the change from "gentile" to "civil" society. It does not appear that any people in ancient America ever approached very near to this earlier change. None had fairly begun to emerge from gentilism; none had advanced so far as the Greeks of the first Olympiad or the Romans under the rule of the Tarquins.

[Footnote 100: When Pocahontas visited London in 1616 she was received at court as befitted a "king's daughter," and the old Virginia historian, William Stith (born in 1689), says it was a "constant tradition" in his day that James I. "became jealous, and was highly offended at Mr. Rolfe for marrying a princess." The notion was that "if Virginia descended to Pocahontas, as it might do at Powhatan's death, at her own death the kingdom would be vested in Mr. Rolfe's posterity." Esten Cooke's Virginia, p. 100. Powhatan (i. e. Wahunsunakok, chief of the Powhatan tribe) was often called "emperor" by the English settlers. To their intense bewilderment he told one of them that his office would descend to his [maternal] brothers, even though he had sons living. It was thought that this could not be true.]

[Footnote 101: The small states into which tribes were at first transformed have in many cases survived to the present time as portions of great states or nations. The shires or counties of England, which have been reproduced in the United States, originated in this way, as I have briefly explained in my little book on Civil Government in the United States, p. 49. When you look on the map of England, and see the town of Icklingham in the county of Suffolk, it means that this place was once the "home" of the "Icklings" or "children of Ickel," a clan which formed part of the tribe of Angles known as "South folk." So the names of Gaulish tribes survived as names of French provinces, e. g. Auvergne from the Arverni, Poitou from the Pictavi, Anjou from the Andecavi, Bearn from the Bigerrones, etc.]

[Footnote 102: "It was no easy task to accomplish such a fundamental change, however simple and obvious it may now seem.... Anterior to experience, a township, as the unit of a political system, was abstruse enough to tax the Greeks and Romans to the depths of their capacities before the conception was formed and set in practical operation." Morgan, Ancient Society, p. 218.]

[Sidenote: Suspicions as to the erroneousness of the Spanish accounts.]

[Sidenote: Detection and explanation of the errors, by Lewis Morgan.]

The first eminent writer to express a serious doubt as to the correctness of the earlier views of Mexican civilization was that sagacious Scotchman, William Robertson.[103] The illustrious statesman and philologist, Albert Gallatin, founder of the American Ethnological Society, published in the first volume of its "Transactions" an essay which recognized the danger of trusting the Spanish narratives without very careful and critical scrutiny.[104] It is to be observed that Mr. Gallatin approached the subject with somewhat more knowledge of aboriginal life in America than had been possessed by previous writers. A similar scepticism was expressed by Lewis Cass, who also knew a great deal about Indians.[105] Next came Mr. Morgan,[106] the man of path-breaking ideas, whose minute and profound acquaintance with Indian life was joined with a power of penetrating the hidden implications of facts so keen and so sure as to amount to genius. Mr. Morgan saw the nature of the delusion under which the Spaniards laboured; he saw that what they mistook for feudal castles owned by great lords, and inhabited by dependent retainers, were really huge communal houses, owned and inhabited by clans, or rather by segments of overgrown clans. He saw this so vividly that it betrayed him now and then into a somewhat impatient and dogmatic manner of statement; but that was a slight fault, for what he saw was not the outcome of dreamy speculation but of scientific insight. His researches, which reduced "Montezuma's empire" to a confederacy of tribes dwelling in pueblos, governed by a council of chiefs, and collecting tribute from neighbouring pueblos, have been fully sustained by subsequent investigation.

[Footnote 103: Robertson's History of America, 9th ed. vol. iii. pp. 274, 281.]

[Footnote 104: "Notes on the Semi-civilized Nations of Mexico, Yucatan, and Central America," American Ethnological Society's Transactions, vol. i., New York, 1852. There is a brief account of Mr. Gallatin's pioneer work in American philology and ethnology in Stevens's Albert Gallatin, pp. 386-396.]

[Footnote 105: Cass, "Aboriginal Structures," North Amer. Review, Oct., 1840.]

[Footnote 106: Mr. R. A. Wilson's New History of the Conquest of Mexico, Philadelphia, 1859, denounced the Spanish conquerors as wholesale liars, but as his book was ignorant, uncritical, and full of wild fancies, it produced little effect. It was demolished, with neatness and despatch, in two articles in the Atlantic Monthly, April and May, 1859, by the eminent historian John Foster Kirk, whose History of Charles the Bold is in many respects a worthy companion to the works of Prescott and Motley. Mr. Kirk had been Mr. Prescott's secretary.]

[Sidenote: Adolf Bandelier's researches.]

The state of society which Cortes saw has, indeed, passed away, and its monuments and hieroglyphic records have been in great part destroyed. Nevertheless some monuments and some hieroglyphic records remain, and the people are still there. Tlascalans and Aztecs, descendants in the eleventh or twelfth generation from the men whose bitter feuds gave such a golden opportunity to Cortes, still dwell upon the soil of Mexico, and speak the language in which Montezuma made his last harangue to the furious people. There is, moreover, a great mass of literature in Spanish, besides more or less in Nahuatl, written during the century following the conquest, and the devoted missionaries and painstaking administrators, who wrote books about the country in which they were working, were not engaged in a wholesale conspiracy for deceiving mankind. From a really critical study of this literature, combined with archaeological investigation, much may be expected; and a noble beginning has already been made. A more extensive acquaintance with Mexican literature would at times have materially modified Mr. Morgan's conclusions, though without altering their general drift. At this point the work has been taken up by Mr. Adolf Bandelier, of Highland, Illinois, to whose rare sagacity and untiring industry as a field archaeologist is joined such a thorough knowledge of Mexican literature as few men before him have possessed. Armed with such resources, Mr. Bandelier is doing for the ancient history of America work as significant as that which Mommsen has done for Rome, or Baur for the beginnings of Christianity. When a sufficient mass of facts and incidents have once been put upon record, it is hard for ignorant misconception to bury the truth in a pit so deep but that the delving genius of critical scholarship will sooner or later drag it forth into the light of day.[107]

[Footnote 107: A summary of Mr. Bandelier's principal results, with copious citation and discussion of original Spanish and Nahuatl sources, is contained in his three papers, "On the art of war and mode of warfare of the ancient Mexicans,"—"On the distribution and tenure of land, and the customs with respect to inheritance, among the ancient Mexicans,"—"On the social organization and mode of government of the ancient Mexicans," Peabody Museum Reports, vol. ii., 1876-79, pp. 95-161, 385-448, 557-699.]

[Sidenote: The Aztec confederacy.]

At this point in our exposition a very concise summary of Mr. Bandelier's results will suffice to enable the reader to understand their import. What has been called the "empire of Montezuma" was in reality a confederacy of three tribes, the Aztecs, Tezcucans, and Tlacopans,[108] dwelling in three large composite pueblos situated very near together in one of the strongest defensive positions ever occupied by Indians. This Aztec confederacy extended its "sway" over a considerable portion of the Mexican peninsula, but that "sway" could not correctly be described as "empire," for it was in no sense a military occupation of the country. The confederacy did not have garrisons in subject pueblos or civil officials to administer their affairs for them. It simply sent some of its chiefs about from one pueblo to another to collect tribute. This tax consisted in great part of maize and other food, and each tributary pueblo reserved a certain portion of its tribal territory to be cultivated for the benefit of the domineering confederacy. If a pueblo proved delinquent or recalcitrant, Aztec warriors swooped down upon it in stealthy midnight assault, butchered its inhabitants and emptied its granaries, and when the paroxysm of rage had spent itself, went exulting homeward, carrying away women for concubines, men to be sacrificed, and such miscellaneous booty as could be conveyed without wagons or beasts to draw them.[109] If the sudden assault, with scaling ladders, happened to fail, the assailants were likely to be baffled, for there was no artillery, and so little food could be carried that a siege meant starvation for the besiegers.

[Footnote 108: In the Iroquois confederacy the Mohawks enjoyed a certain precedence or seniority, the Onondagas had the central council-fire, and the Senecas, who had the two head war-chiefs, were much the most numerous. In the Mexican confederacy the various points of superiority seem to have been more concentrated in the Aztecs; but spoils and tribute were divided into five portions, of which Mexico and Tezcuco each took two, and Tlacopan one.]

[Footnote 109: The wretched prisoners were ordinarily compelled to carry the booty.]

The tributary pueblos were also liable to be summoned to furnish a contingent of warriors to the war-parties of the confederacy, under the same penalties for delinquency as in the case of refusal of tribute. In such cases it was quite common for the confederacy to issue a peremptory summons, followed by a declaration of war. When a pueblo was captured, the only way in which the vanquished people could stop the massacre was by holding out signals of submission; a parley then sometimes adjusted the affair, and the payment of a year's tribute in advance induced the conquerors to depart, but captives once taken could seldom if ever be ransomed. If the parties could not agree upon terms, the slaughter was renewed, and sometimes went on until the departing victors left nought behind them but ruined houses belching from loop-hole and doorway lurid clouds of smoke and flame upon narrow silent streets heaped up with mangled corpses.

The sway of the Aztec confederacy over the Mexican peninsula was thus essentially similar to the sway of the Iroquois confederacy over a great part of the tribes between the Connecticut river and the Mississippi. It was simply the levying of tribute,—a system of plunder enforced by terror. The so-called empire was "only a partnership formed for the purpose of carrying on the business of warfare, and that intended, not for the extension of territorial ownership, but only for an increase of the means of subsistence."[110] There was none of that coalescence and incorporation of peoples which occurs after the change from gentilism to civil society has been effected. Among the Mexicans, as elsewhere throughout North America, the tribe remained intact as the highest completed political integer.

[Footnote 110: Bandelier, op. cit. p. 563.]

[Sidenote: Aztec clans.]

The Aztec tribe was organized in clans and phratries, and the number of clans would indicate that the tribe was a very large one.[111] There were twenty clans, called in the Nahuatl language "calpullis." We may fairly suppose that the average size of a clan was larger than the average tribe of Algonquins or Iroquois; but owing to the compact "city" life, this increase of numbers did not result in segmentation and scattering, as among Indians in the lower status. Each Aztec clan seems to have occupied a number of adjacent communal houses, forming a kind of precinct, with its special house or houses for official purposes, corresponding to the estufas in the New Mexican pueblos. The houses were the common property of the clan, and so was the land which its members cultivated; and such houses and land could not be sold or bartered away by the clan, or in anywise alienated. The idea of "real estate" had not been developed; the clan simply exercised a right of occupancy, and—as among some ruder Indians—its individual members exercised certain limited rights of user in particular garden-plots.

[Footnote 111: The notion of an immense population groaning under the lash of taskmasters, and building huge palaces for idle despots must be dismissed. The statements which refer to such a vast population are apt to be accompanied by incompatible statements. Mr. Morgan is right in throwing the burden of proof upon those who maintain that a people without domestic animals or field agriculture could have been so numerous (Anc. Soc., p. 195). On the other hand, I believe Mr. Morgan makes a grave mistake in the opposite direction, in underestimating the numbers that could be supported upon Indian corn even under a system of horticulture without the use of the plough. Some pertinent remarks on the extraordinary reproductive power of maize in Mexico may be found in Humboldt, Essai politique sur la Nouvelle Espagne, Paris, 1811, tom. iii. pp. 51-60; the great naturalist is of course speaking of the yield of maize in ploughed lands, but, after making due allowances, the yield under the ancient system must have been well-nigh unexampled in barbaric agriculture.]

[Sidenote: Clan officers.]

The clan was governed by a clan council, consisting of chiefs (tecuhtli) elected by the clan, and inducted into office after a cruel religious ordeal, in which the candidate was bruised, tortured, and half starved. An executive department was more clearly differentiated from the council than among the Indians of the lower status. The clan (calpulli) had an official head, or sachem, called the calpullec; and also a military commander called the ahcacautin, or "elder brother." The ahcacautin was also a kind of peace officer, or constable, for the precinct occupied by the clan, and carried about with him a staff of office; a tuft of white feathers attached to this staff betokened that his errand was one of death. The clan elected its calpullec and ahcacautin, and could depose them for cause.[112]

[Footnote 112: Compare this description with that of the institutions of Indians in the lower status, above, p. 69.]

[Sidenote: Rights and duties of the clan.]

The members of the clan were reciprocally bound to aid, defend, and avenge one another; but wergild was no longer accepted, and the penalty for murder was death. The clan exercised the right of naming its members. Such names were invariably significant (as Nezahualcoyotl, "Hungry Coyote," Axayacatl, "Face-in-the-Water," etc.), and more or less "medicine," or superstitious association, was attached to the name. The clans also had their significant names and totems. Each clan had its peculiar religious rites, its priests or medicine-men who were members of the clan council, and its temple or medicine-house. Instead of burying their dead the Mexican tribes practised cremation; there was, therefore, no common cemetery, but the funeral ceremonies were conducted by the clan.

[Sidenote: Aztec phratries.]

The clans of the Aztecs, like those of many other Mexican tribes, were organized into four phratries; and this divided the city of Mexico, as the Spaniards at once remarked, into four quarters. The phratry had acquired more functions than it possessed in the lower status. Besides certain religious and social duties, and besides its connection with the punishment of criminals, the Mexican phratry was an organization for military purposes.[113] The four phratries were four divisions of the tribal host, each with its captain. In each of the quarters was an arsenal, or "dart-house," where weapons were stored, and from which they were handed out to war-parties about to start on an expedition.

[Footnote 113: In this respect it seems to have had some resemblance to the Roman centuria and Teutonic hundred. So in prehistoric Greece we may perhaps infer from Nestor's advice to Agamemnon that a similar organization existed:—

[Greek: krin' andras kata phyla, kata phretras, Agamemnon, hos phretre phretrephin arege, phyla de phylois.] Iliad, ii. 362.

But the phratry seems never to have reached so high a development among the Greeks as among the Romans and the early English.]

[Sidenote: The tribal council.]

The supreme government of the Aztecs was vested in the tribal council composed of twenty members, one for each clan. The member, representing a clan, was not its calpullec, or "sachem;" he was one of the tecuhtli, or clan-chiefs, and was significantly called the "speaker" (tlatoani). The tribal council, thus composed of twenty speakers, was called the tlatocan, or "place of speech."[114] At least as often as once in ten days the council assembled at the tecpan, or official house of the tribe, but it could be convened whenever occasion required, and in cases of emergency was continually in session. Its powers and duties were similar to those of an ancient English shiremote, in so far as they were partly directive and partly judicial. A large part of its business was settling disputes between the clans. It superintended the ceremonies of investiture with which the chiefs and other officers of the clans were sworn into office. At intervals of eighty days there was an "extra session" of the tlatocan, attended also by the twenty "elder brothers," the four phratry-captains, the two executive chiefs of the tribe, and the leading priests, and at such times a reconsideration of an unpopular decision might be urged; but the authority of the tlatocan was supreme, and from its final decision there could be no appeal.[115]

[Footnote 114: Compare parliament from parler. These twenty were the "grandees," "counsellors," and "captains" mentioned by Bernal Diaz as always in Montezuma's company; "y siempre a la contina estaban en su compania veinte grandes senores y consejeros y capitanes," etc. Historia verdadera, ii. 95. See Bandelier, op. cit. p. 646.]

[Footnote 115: Mr. Bandelier's note on this point gives an especially apt illustration of the confusion of ideas and inconsistencies of statement amid which the early Spanish writers struggled to understand and describe this strange society: op. cit. p. 651.]

[Sidenote: The "snake-woman."]

The executive chiefs of the tribe were two in number, as was commonly the case in ancient America. The tribal sachem, or civil executive, bore the grotesque title of cihuacoatl, or "snake-woman."[116] His relation to the tribe was in general like that of the calpullec to the clan. He executed the decrees of the tribal council, of which he was ex officio a member, and was responsible for the housing of tribute and its proper distribution among the clans. He was also chief judge, and he was lieutenant to the head war-chief in command of the tribal host.[117] He was elected for life by the tribal council, which could depose him for misconduct.

[Footnote 116: In Aztec mythology Cihuacoatl was wife of the supreme night deity, Tezcatlipoca. Squier, Serpent Symbol in America, pp. 159-166, 174-183. On the connection between serpent worship and human sacrifices, see Fergusson's Tree and Serpent Worship, pp. 3-5, 38-41. Much evidence as to American serpent worship is collected in J. G. Mueller's Geschichte der amerikanischen Urreligionen, Basel, 1855. The hieroglyphic emblem of the Aztec tribal sachem was a female head surmounted by a snake.]

[Footnote 117: Other tribes besides the Aztec had the "snake-woman." In the city of Mexico the Spaniards mistook him for a "second-king," or "royal lieutenant." In other towns they regarded him, somewhat more correctly, as "governor," and called him gobernador,—a title still applied to the tribal sachem of the pueblo Indians, as e. g. in Zuni heretofore mentioned; see above p. 89.]

[Sidenote: The "chief-of men."]

[Sidenote: Evolution of kingship in Greece and Rome.]

The office of head war-chief was an instance of primitive royalty in a very interesting stage of development. The title of this officer was tlacatecuhtli, or "chief-of-men."[118] He was primarily head war-chief of the Aztec tribe, but about 1430 became supreme military commander of the three confederate tribes, so that his office was one of peculiar dignity and importance. When the Spaniards arrived upon the scene Montezuma was tlacatecuhtli, and they naturally called him "king." To understand precisely how far such an epithet could correctly be applied to him, and how far it was misleading, we must recall the manner in which early kingship arose in Europe. The Roman rex was an officer elected for life; the typical Greek basileus was a somewhat more fully developed king, inasmuch as his office was becoming practically hereditary; otherwise rex was about equivalent to basileus. Alike in Rome and in Greece the king had at least three great functions, and possibly four.[119] He was, primarily, chief commander, secondly, chief priest, thirdly, chief judge; whether he had reached the fourth stage and added the functions of chief civil executive, is matter of dispute. Kingship in Rome and in most Greek cities was overthrown at so early a date that some questions of this sort are difficult to settle. But in all probability the office grew up through the successive acquisition of ritual, judicial, and civil functions by the military commander. The paramount necessity of consulting the tutelar deities before fighting resulted in making the general a priest competent to perform sacrifices and interpret omens;[120] he thus naturally became the most important among priests; an increased sanctity invested his person and office; and by and by he acquired control over the dispensation of justice, and finally over the whole civil administration. One step more was needed to develop the basileus into a despot, like the king of Persia, and that was to let him get into his hands the law-making power, involving complete control over taxation. When the Greeks and Romans became dissatisfied with the increasing powers of their kings, they destroyed the office. The Romans did not materially diminish its functions, but put them into commission, by entrusting them to two consuls of equal authority elected annually. The Greeks, on the other hand, divided the royal functions among different officers, as e. g. at Athens among the nine archons.[121]

[Footnote 118: This title seems precisely equivalent to [Greek: anax andron], commonly applied to Agamemnon, and sometimes to other chieftains, in the Iliad.]

[Footnote 119: Ramsay's Roman Antiquities, p. 64; Hermann's Political Antiquities of Greece, p. 105; Morgan, Anc. Soc., p. 248.]

[Footnote 120: Such would naturally result from the desirableness of securing unity of command. If Demosthenes had been in sole command of the Athenian armament in the harbour of Syracuse, and had been a basileus, with priestly authority, who can doubt that some such theory of the eclipse as that suggested by Philochorus would have been adopted, and thus one of the world's great tragedies averted? See Grote, Hist. Greece, vol. vii. chap. lx. M. Fustel de Coulanges, in his admirable book La Cite antique, pp. 205-210, makes the priestly function of the king primitive, and the military function secondary; which is entirely inconsistent with what we know of barbarous races.]

[Footnote 121: It is worthy of note that the archon who retained the priestly function was called basileus, showing perhaps that at that time this had come to be most prominent among the royal functions, or more likely that it was the one with which reformers had some religious scruples about interfering. The Romans, too, retained part of the king's priestly function in an officer called rex sacrorum, whose duty was at times to offer a sacrifice in the forum, and then run away as fast as legs could carry him,—[Greek: hen thysas ho basileus, kata tachos apeisi pheugon ex agoras] (!) Plutarch, Quaest. Rom. 63.]

[Sidenote: Mediaeval kingship.]

The typical kingship in mediaeval Europe, after the full development of the feudal system, was very different indeed from the kingship in early Greece and Rome. In the Middle Ages all priestly functions had passed into the hands of the Church.[122] A king like Charles VII. of France, or Edward III. of England, was military commander, civil magistrate, chief judge, and supreme landlord; the people were his tenants. That was the kind of king with which the Spanish discoverers of Mexico were familiar.

[Footnote 122: Something of the priestly quality of "sanctity," however, surrounded the king's person; and the ceremony of anointing the king at his coronation was a survival of the ancient rite which invested the head war-chief with priestly attributes.]

[Sidenote: Montezuma was a "priest-commander."]

Now the Mexican tlacatecuhtli, or "chief-of-men," was much more like Agamemnon in point of kingship than like Edward III. He was not supreme landlord, for landlordship did not exist in Mexico. He was not chief judge or civil magistrate; those functions belonged to the "snake-woman." Mr. Bandelier regards the "chief-of-men" as simply a military commander; but for reasons which I shall state hereafter,[123] it seems quite clear that he exercised certain very important priestly functions, although beside him there was a kind of high-priest or medicine-chief. If I am right in holding that Montezuma was a "priest-commander," then incipient royalty in Mexico had advanced at least one stage beyond the head war-chief of the Iroquois, and remained one stage behind the basileus of the Homeric Greeks.

[Footnote 123: They can be most conveniently stated in connection with the story of the conquest of Mexico; see below, vol. ii. p. 278. When Mr. Bandelier completes his long-promised paper on the ancient Mexican religion, perhaps it will appear that he has taken these facts into the account.]

[Sidenote: Mode of succession to the office.]

The tlacatecuhtli, or "chief-of-men," was elected by an assembly consisting of the tribal council, the "elder brothers" of the several clans, and certain leading priests. Though the office was thus elective, the choice seems to have been practically limited to a particular clan, and in the eleven chiefs who were chosen from 1375 to 1520 a certain principle or custom of succession seems to be plainly indicated.[124] There was a further limit to the order of succession. Allusion has been made to the four phratry-captains commanding the quarters of the city. Their cheerful titles were "man of the house of darts," "cutter of men," "bloodshedder," and "chief of the eagle and cactus." These captains were military chiefs of the phratries, and also magistrates charged with the duty of maintaining order and enforcing the decrees of the council in their respective quarters. The "chief of the eagle and cactus" was chief executioner,—Jack Ketch. He was not eligible for the office of "chief-of-men;" the three other phratry-captains were eligible. Then there was a member of the priesthood entitled "man of the dark house." This person, with the three eligible captains, made a quartette, and one of this privileged four must succeed to the office of "chief-of-men."

[Footnote 124: I cannot follow Mr. Bandelier in discrediting Clavigero's statement that the office of tlacatecuhtli "should always remain in the house of Acamapitzin," inasmuch as the eleven who were actually elected were all closely akin to one another. In point of fact it did remain "in the house of Acamapitzin."]

The eligibility of the "man of the dark house" may be cited here as positive proof that sometimes the "chief-of-men" could be a "priest-commander." That in all cases he acquired priestly functions after election, even when he did not possess them before, is indicated by the fact that at the ceremony of his induction into office he ascended to the summit of the pyramid sacred to the war-god Huitzilopochtli, where he was anointed by the high-priest with a black ointment, and sprinkled with sanctified water; having thus become consecrated he took a censer of live coals and a bag of copal, and as his first official act offered incense to the war-god.[125]

[Footnote 125: H. H. Bancroft, Native Races of the Pacific States, vol. ii. p. 145. Hence the accounts of the reverent demeanour of the people toward Montezuma, though perhaps overcoloured, are not so absurd as Mr. Morgan deemed them. Mr. Morgan was sometimes too anxious to reduce Montezuma to the level of an Iroquois war-chief.]

[Sidenote: Manner of collecting tribute.]

As the "chief-of-men" was elected, so too he could be deposed for misbehaviour. He was ex officio a member of the tribal council, and he had his official residence in the tecpan, or tribal house, where the meetings of the council were held, and where the hospitalities of the tribe were extended to strangers. As an administrative officer, the "chief-of-men" had little to do within the limits of the tribe; that, as already observed, was the business of the "snake-woman." But outside of the confederacy the "chief-of-men" exercised administrative functions. He superintended the collection of tribute. Each of the three confederate tribes appointed, through its tribal council, agents to visit the subjected pueblos and gather in the tribute. These agents were expressively termed calpixqui, "crop-gatherers." As these men were obliged to spend considerable time in the vanquished pueblos in the double character of tax-collectors and spies, we can imagine how hateful their position was. Their security from injury depended upon the reputation of their tribes for ruthless ferocity.[126] The tiger-like confederacy was only too ready to take offence; in the lack of a decent pretext it often went to war without one, simply in order to get human victims for sacrifice.

[Footnote 126: As I have elsewhere observed in a similar case:—"Each summer there came two Mohawk elders, secure in the dread that Iroquois prowess had everywhere inspired; and up and down the Connecticut valley they seized the tribute of weapons and wampum, and proclaimed the last harsh edict issued from the savage council at Onondaga." Beginnings of New England, p. 121.]

Once appointed, the tax-gatherers were directed by the "chief-of-men." The tribute was chiefly maize, but might be anything the conquerors chose to demand,—weapons, fine pottery or featherwork, gold ornaments, or female slaves. Sometimes the tributary pueblo, instead of sacrificing all its prisoners of war upon its own altars, sent some of them up to Mexico as part of its tribute. The ravening maw of the horrible deities was thus appeased, not by the pueblo that paid the blackmail, but by the power that extorted it, and thus the latter obtained a larger share of divine favour. Generally the unhappy prisoners were forced to carry the corn and other articles. They were convoyed by couriers who saw that everything was properly delivered at the tecpan, and also brought information by word of mouth and by picture-writing from the calpixqui to the "chief-of-men." When the newly-arrived Spaniards saw these couriers coming and going they fancied that they were "ambassadors." This system of tribute-taking made it necessary to build roads, and this in turn facilitated, not only military operations, but trade, which had already made some progress albeit of a simple sort. These "roads" might perhaps more properly be called Indian trails,[127] but they served their purpose.

[Footnote 127: See Salmeron's letter of August 13, 1531, to the Council of the Indies, cited in Bandelier, op. cit. p. 696. The letter recommends that to increase the security of the Spanish hold upon the country the roads should be made practicable for beasts and wagons. They were narrow paths running straight ahead up hill and down dale, sometimes crossing narrow ravines upon heavy stone culverts.]

[Sidenote: Aztec and Iroquois confederacies contrasted.]

The general similarity of the Aztec confederacy to that of the Iroquois, in point of social structure, is thus clearly manifest. Along with this general similarity we have observed some points of higher development, such as one might expect to find in traversing the entire length of an ethnical period. Instead of stockaded villages, with houses of bark or of clay supported upon a wooden framework, we have pueblos of adobe-brick or stone, in various stages of evolution, the most advanced of which present the appearance of castellated cities. Along with the systematic irrigation and increased dependence upon horticulture, we find evidences of greater density of population; and we see in the victorious confederacy a more highly developed organization for adding to its stock of food and other desirable possessions by the systematic plunder of neighbouring weaker communities. Naturally such increase in numbers and organization entails some increase in the number of officers and some differentiation of their functions, as illustrated in the representation of the clans (calpulli) in the tribal council (tlatocan), by speakers (tlatoani) chosen for the purpose, and not by the official heads (calpullec) of the clan. Likewise in the military commander-in-chief (tlacatecuhtli) we observe a marked increase in dignity, and—as I have already suggested and hope to maintain—we find that his office has been clothed with sacerdotal powers, and has thus taken a decided step toward kingship of the ancient type, as depicted in the Homeric poems.

[Sidenote: Aztec priesthood: human sacrifices.]

No feature of the advance is more noteworthy than the development of the medicine-men into an organized priesthood.[128] The presence of this priesthood and its ritual was proclaimed to the eyes of the traveller in ancient Mexico by the numerous tall truncated pyramids (teocallis), on the flat summits of which men, women, and children were sacrificed to the gods. This custom of human sacrifice seems to have been a characteristic of the middle period of barbarism, and to have survived, with diminishing frequency, into the upper period. There are abundant traces of its existence throughout the early Aryan world, from Britain to Hindustan, as well as among the ancient Hebrews and their kindred.[129] But among all these peoples, at the earliest times at which we can study them with trustworthy records, we find the custom of human sacrifice in an advanced stage of decline, and generally no longer accompanied by the custom of cannibalism in which it probably originated.[130] Among the Mexicans, however, when they were first visited by the Spaniards, cannibalism flourished as nowhere else in the world except perhaps in Fiji, and human sacrifices were conducted on such a scale as could not have been witnessed in Europe without going back more than forty centuries.

[Footnote 128: The priesthood was not hereditary, nor did it form a caste. There was no hereditary nobility in ancient Mexico, nor were there any hereditary vocations, as "artisans," "merchants," etc. See Bandelier, op. cit. p. 599.]

[Footnote 129: See the copious references in Tylor's Primitive Culture, ii. 340-371; Mackay, Religious Development of the Greeks and Hebrews, ii. 406-434; Oort and Hooykaas, The Bible for Young People, i. 30, 189-193; ii. 102, 220; iii. 21, 170, 316, 393, 395; iv. 85, 226. Ghillany, Die Menschenopfer der alten Hebraeer, Nuremberg, 1842, treats the subject with much learning.]

[Footnote 130: Spencer, Princip. Sociol., i. 287; Tylor, op. cit. ii. 345.]

The custom of sacrificing captives to the gods was a marked advance upon the practice in the lower period of barbarism, when the prisoner, unless saved by adoption into the tribe of his captors, was put to death with lingering torments. There were occasions on which the Aztecs tortured their prisoners before sending them to the altar,[131] but in general the prisoner was well-treated and highly fed,—fatted, in short, for the final banquet in which the worshippers participated with their savage deity.[132] In a more advanced stage of development than that which the Aztecs had reached, in the stage when agriculture became extensive enough to create a steady demand for servile labour, the practice of enslaving prisoners became general; and as slaves became more and more valuable, men gradually succeeded in compounding with their deities for easier terms,—a ram, or a kid, or a bullock, instead of the human victim.[133]

[Footnote 131: Mr. Prescott, to avoid shocking the reader with details, refers him to the twenty-first canto of Dante's Inferno, Conquest of Mexico, vol. i. p. 64.]

[Footnote 132: See below, vol. ii. p. 283.]

[Footnote 133: The victim, by the offer of which the wrath of the god was appeased or his favour solicited, must always be some valued possession of the sacrificer. Hence, e. g., among the Hebrews "wild animals, as not being property, were generally considered unfit for sacrifice." (Mackay, op. cit. ii. 398.) Among the Aztecs (Prescott, loc. cit.) on certain occasions of peculiar solemnity the clan offered some of its own members, usually children. In the lack of prisoners such offerings would more often be necessary, hence one powerful incentive to war. The use of prisoners to buy the god's favour was to some extent a substitute for the use of the clan's own members, and at a later stage the use of domestic animals was a further substitution. The legend of Abraham and Isaac (Genesis, xxii. 1-14) preserves the tradition of this latter substitution among the ancient Hebrews. Compare the Boeotian legend of the temple of Dionysos Aigobolos:—[Greek: thyontes gar to theo proechthesan pote hypo methes es hybrin, hoste kai tou Dionysou ton hierea apokteinousin; apokteinantas de autika epelabe nosos loimodes; kai sphisin aphiketo hama ek Delphon, to Dionyso thyein paida horaion; etesi de ou pollois hysteron ton theon phasin aiga hiereion hypallaxai sphisin anti tou paidos.]

Pausanias, ix. 8. A further stage of progress was the substitution of a mere inanimate symbol for a living victim, whether human or brute, as shown in the old Roman custom of appeasing "Father Tiber" once a year by the ceremony of drowning a lot of dolls in that river. Of this significant rite Mommsen aptly observes, "Die Ideen goettlicher Gnade und Versoehnbarkeit sind hier ununterscheidbar gemischt mit der frommen Schlauigkeit, welche es versucht den gefaehrlichen Herrn durch scheinhafte Befriedigung zu beruecken und abzufinden." Roemische Geschichte, 4e Aufl., 1865, Bd. i. p. 176. After reading such a remark it may seem odd to find the writer, in a footnote, refusing to accept the true explanation of the custom; but that was a quarter of a century ago, when much less was known about ancient society than now.]

[Sidenote: Aztec slaves.]

The ancient Mexicans had not arrived at this stage, which in the Old World characterized the upper period of barbarism. Slavery had, however, made a beginning among the Aztecs. The nucleus of the small slave-population of Mexico consisted of outcasts, persons expelled from the clan for some misdemeanour. The simplest case was that in which a member of a clan failed for two years to cultivate his garden-plot.[134] The delinquent member was deprived, not only of his right of user, but of all his rights as a clansman, and the only way to escape starvation was to work upon some other lot, either in his own or in some other clan, and be paid in such pittance from its produce as the occupant might choose to give him. This was slavery in embryo. The occupant did not own this outcast labourer, any more than he owned his lot; he only possessed a limited right of user in both labourer and lot. To a certain extent it was "adverse" or exclusive possession. If the slave ran away or was obstinately lazy, he could be made to wear a wooden collar and sold without his consent; if it proved too troublesome to keep him, the collared slave could be handed over to the priests for sacrifice.[135] In this class of outcasts and their masters we have an interesting illustration of a rudimentary phase of slavery and of private property.

[Footnote 134: Bandelier, op. cit. p. 611.]

[Footnote 135: There was, however, in this extreme case, a right of sanctuary. If the doomed slave could flee and hide himself in the tecpan before the master or one of his sons could catch him, he became free and recovered his clan-rights; and no third person was allowed to interfere in aid of the pursuer. Torquemada, Monarquia indiana, ii. 564-566.]

[Sidenote: The Aztec family.]

At this point it is worthy of note that in the development of the family the Aztecs had advanced considerably beyond the point attained by Shawnees and Mohawks, and a little way toward the point attained in the patriarchal family of the ancient Romans and Hebrews. In the Aztec clan (which was exogamous[136]) the change to descent in the male line seems to have been accomplished before the time of the Discovery. Apparently it had been recently accomplished. Names for designating family relationships remained in that primitive stage in which no distinction is made between father and uncle, grandchildren and cousins. The family was still too feebly established to count for much in the structure of society, which still rested firmly upon the clan.[137] Nevertheless the marriage bonds were drawn much tighter than among Indians of the lower status, and penalties for incontinence were more severe. The wife became her husband's property and was entitled to the protection of his clan. All matrimonial arrangements were controlled by the clan, and no member of it, male or female, was allowed to remain unmarried, except for certain religious reasons. The penalty for contumacy was expulsion from the clan, and the same penalty was inflicted for such sexual irregularities as public opinion, still in what we should call quite a primitive stage, condemned. Men and women thus expelled went to swell the numbers of that small class of outcasts already noted. With men the result, as we have seen, was a kind of slavery; with women it was prostitution; and it is curious to see that the same penalty, entailing such a result, was visited alike upon unseemly frailty and upon refusal to marry. In either case the sin consisted in rebellion against the clan's standards of proper or permissible behaviour.

[Footnote 136: Bancroft, Native Races of the Pacific States, vol. ii. p. 251.]

[Footnote 137: Bandelier, op. cit. pp. 429, 570, 620.]

[Sidenote: Aztec property.]

The inheritance in the male line, the beginnings of individual property in slaves, the tightening of the marriage bond, accompanied by the condemnation of sundry irregularities heretofore tolerated, are phenomena which we might expect to find associated together. They are germs of the upper status of barbarism, as well as of the earliest status of civilization more remotely to follow. The common cause, of which they are the manifestations, is an increasing sense of the value and importance of personal property. In the Old World this sense grew up during a pastoral stage of society such as the New World never knew, and by the ages of Abraham and Agamemnon[138] it had produced results such as had not been reached in Mexico at the time of the Discovery. Still the tendency in the latter country was in a similar direction. Though there was no notion of real estate, and the house was still clan-property, yet the number and value of articles of personal ownership had no doubt greatly increased during the long interval which must have elapsed since the ancestral Mexicans entered upon the middle status. The mere existence of large and busy market-places with regular and frequent fairs, even though trade had scarcely begun to emerge from the stage of barter, is sufficient proof of this. Such fairs and markets do not belong to the Mohawk chapter in human progress. They imply a considerable number and diversity of artificial products, valued as articles of personal property. A legitimate inference from them is the existence of a certain degree of luxury, though doubtless luxury of a barbaric type.

[Footnote 138: I here use these world-famous names without any implication as to their historical character, or their precise date, which are in themselves interesting subjects for discussion. I use them as best symbolizing the state of society which existed about the northern and eastern shores of the eastern Mediterranean, several centuries before the Olympiads.]

[Sidenote: Mr. Morgan's rules.]

It is at this point, I think, that a judicious critic will begin to part company with Mr. Morgan. As regards the outward aspect of the society which the Spaniards found in Mexico, that eminent scholar more than once used arguments that were inconsistent with principles of criticism laid down by himself. At the beginning of his chapter on the Aztec confederacy Mr. Morgan proposed the following rules:—

"The histories of Spanish America may be trusted in whatever relates to the acts of the Spaniards, and to the acts and personal characteristics of the Indians; in whatever relates to their weapons, implements and utensils, fabrics, food and raiment, and things of a similar character.

"But in whatever relates to Indian society and government, their social relations and plan of life, they are nearly worthless, because they learned nothing and knew nothing of either. We are at full liberty to reject them in these respects and commence anew; using any facts they may contain which harmonize with what is known of Indian society."[139]

[Footnote 139: Morgan, Ancient Society, p. 186, note.]

Perhaps it would have been better if the second of these rules had been somewhat differently worded; for even with regard to the strange society and government, the Spanish writers have recorded an immense number of valuable facts, without which Mr. Bandelier's work would have been impossible. It is not so much the facts as the interpretations of the Spanish historians that are "nearly worthless," and even their misinterpretations are interesting and instructive when once we rightly understand them. Sometimes they really help us toward the truth.

[Sidenote: Mr. Morgan sometimes disregarded his own rules: "Montezuma's Dinner."]

The broad distinction, however, as stated in Mr. Morgan's pair of rules, is well taken. In regard to such a strange form of society the Spanish discoverers of Mexico could not help making mistakes, but in regard to utensils and dress their senses were not likely to deceive them, and their statements, according to Mr. Morgan, may be trusted. Very good. But as soon as Mr. Morgan had occasion to write about the social life of the Aztecs, he forgot his own rules and paid as little respect to the senses of eye-witnesses as to their judgment. This was amusingly illustrated in his famous essay on "Montezuma's Dinner."[140] When Bernal Diaz describes Montezuma as sitting on a low chair at a table covered with a white cloth, Mr. Morgan declares that it could not have been so,—there were no chairs or tables! On second thought he will admit that there may have been a wooden block hollowed out for a stool, but in the matter of a table he is relentless. So when Cortes, in his despatch to the emperor, speaks of the "wine-cellar" and of the presence of "secretaries" at dinner, Mr. Morgan observes, "Since cursive writing was unknown among the Aztecs, the presence of these secretaries is an amusing feature in the account. The wine-cellar also is remarkable for two reasons: firstly, because the level of the streets and courts was but four feet above the level of the water, which made cellars impossible; and, secondly, because the Aztecs had no knowledge of wine. An acid beer (pulque), made by fermenting the juice of the maguey, was a common beverage of the Aztecs; but it is hardly supposable that even this was used at dinner."[141]

[Footnote 140: North Amer. Review, April, 1876. The substance of it was reproduced in his Houses and House-Life, chap. x.]

[Footnote 141: Houses and House-Life, p. 241.]

To this I would reply that the fibre of that same useful plant from which the Aztecs made their "beer" supplied them also with paper, upon which they were in the habit of writing, not indeed in cursive characters, but in hieroglyphics. This kind of writing, as well as any other, accounts for the presence of secretaries, which seems to me, by the way, a very probable and characteristic feature in the narrative. From the moment the mysterious strangers landed, every movement of theirs had been recorded in hieroglyphics, and there is no reason why notes of what they said and did should not have been taken at dinner. As for the place where the pulque was kept, it was a venial slip of the pen to call it a "wine-cellar," even if it was not below the ground. The language of Cortes does not imply that he visited the "cellar;" he saw a crowd of Indians drinking the beverage, and supposing the great house he was in to be Montezuma's, he expressed his sense of that person's hospitality by saying that "his wine-cellar was open to all." And really, is it not rather a captious criticism which in one breath chides Cortes for calling the beverage "wine," and in the next breath goes on to call it "beer"? The pulque was neither the one nor the other; for want of any other name a German might have called it beer, a Spaniard would be more likely to call it wine. And why is it "hardly supposable" that pulque was used at dinner? Why should Mr. Morgan, who never dined with Montezuma, know so much more about such things than Cortes and Bernal Diaz, who did?[142]

[Footnote 142: Mr. Andrew Lang asks some similar questions in his Myth, Ritual, and Religion, vol. ii. p. 349, but in a tone of impatient contempt which, as applied to a man of Mr. Morgan's calibre, is hardly becoming.]

[Sidenote: The reaction against uncritical and exaggerated statements.]

The Spanish statements of facts are, of course, not to be accepted uncritically. When we are told of cut slabs of porphyry inlaid in the walls of a room, we have a right to inquire how so hard a stone could be cut with flint or copper chisels,[143] and are ready to entertain the suggestion that some other stone might easily have been mistaken for porphyry. Such a critical inquiry is eminently profitable, and none the less so when it brings us to the conclusion that the Aztecs did succeed in cutting porphyry. Again, when we read about Indian armies of 200,000 men, pertinent questions arise as to the commissariat, and we are led to reflect that there is nothing about which old soldiers spin such unconscionable yarns as about the size of the armies they have thrashed. In a fairy tale, of course, such suggestions are impertinent; things can go on anyhow. In real life it is different. The trouble with most historians of the conquest of Mexico has been that they have made it like a fairy tale, and the trouble with Mr. Morgan was that, in a wholesome and much-needed spirit of reaction, he was too much inclined to dismiss the whole story as such. He forgot the first of his pair of rules, and applied the second to everything alike. He felt "at full liberty to reject" the testimony of the discoverers as to what they saw and tasted, and to "commence anew," reasoning from "what is known of Indian society." And here Mr. Morgan's mind was so full of the kind of Indian society which he knew more minutely and profoundly than any other man, that he was apt to forget that there could be any other kind. He overlooked his own distinction between the lower and middle periods of barbarism in his attempt to ignore or minimize the points of difference between Aztecs and Iroquois.[144] In this way he did injustice to his own brilliant and useful classification of stages of culture, and in particular to the middle period of barbarism, the significance of which he was the first to detect, but failed to realize fully because his attention had been so intensely concentrated upon the lower period.

[Footnote 143: For an excellent account of ancient Mexican knives and chisels, see Dr. Valentini's paper on "Semi-Lunar and Crescent-Shaped Tools," in Proceedings of Amer. Antiq. Soc., New Series, vol. iii. pp. 449-474. Compare the very interesting Spanish observations on copper hatchets and flint chisels in Clavigero, Historia antigua, tom. i. p. 242; Mendieta, Historia ecclesiastica indiana, tom. iv. cap. xii.]

[Footnote 144: It often happens that the followers of a great man are more likely to run to extremes than their master, as, for example, when we see the queen of pueblos rashly described as "a collection of mud huts, such as Cortes found and dignified with the name of a city." Smithsonian Report, 1887, part i. p. 691. This is quite inadmissible.]

[Sidenote: Importance of the middle period of barbarism.]

In truth, the middle period of barbarism was one of the most important periods in the career of the human race, and full of fascination to the student, as the unfading interest in ancient Mexico and the huge mass of literature devoted to it show. It spanned the interval between such society as that of Hiawatha and such as that of the Odyssey. One more such interval (and, I suspect, a briefer one, because the use of iron and the development of inheritable wealth would accelerate progress) led to the age that could write the Odyssey, one of the most beautiful productions of the human mind. If Mr. Morgan had always borne in mind that, on his own classification, Montezuma must have been at least as near to Agamemnon as to Powhatan, his attitude toward the Spanish historians would have been less hostile. A Moqui pueblo stands near the lower end of the middle period of barbarism; ancient Troy stood next the upper end. Mr. Morgan found apt illustrations in the former; perhaps if he had lived long enough to profit by the work of Schliemann and Bandelier, he might have found equally apt ones in the latter. Mr. Bandelier's researches certainly show that the ancient city of Mexico, in point of social development, stood somewhere between the two.

How that city looked may best be described when we come to tell what its first Spanish visitors saw. Let it suffice here to say that, upon a reasonable estimate of their testimony, pleasure-gardens, menageries and aviaries, fountains and baths, tessellated marble floors, finely wrought pottery, exquisite featherwork, brilliant mats and tapestries, silver goblets, dainty spices burning in golden censers, varieties of highly seasoned dishes, dramatic performances, jugglers and acrobats, ballad singers and dancing girls,—such things were to be seen in this city of snake-worshipping cannibals. It simulated civilization as a tree-fern simulates a tree.

* * * * *



[Sidenote: Mexicans and Mayas.]

In its general outlines the account here given of Aztec society and government at the time of the Discovery will probably hold true of all the semi-civilized communities of the Mexican peninsula and Central America. The pueblos of Mexico were doubtless of various grades of size, strength, and comfort, ranging from such structures as Zuni up to the city of Mexico. The cities of Chiapas, Yucatan, and Guatemala, whose ruins, in those tropical forests, are so impressive, probably belong to the same class. The Maya-Quiche tribes, who dwelt and still dwell in this region, were different in stock-language from their neighbours of Mexico; but there are strong reasons for believing that the two great groups, Mexicans and Mayas, arose from the expansion and segmentation of one common stock, and there is no doubt as to the very close similarity between the two in government, religion, and social advancement. In some points the Mayas were superior. They possessed a considerable literature, written in highly developed hieroglyphic characters upon maguey paper and upon deerskin parchment, so that from this point of view they stood upon the threshold of civilization as strictly defined.[145] But, like the Mexicans, they were ignorant of iron, their society was organized upon the principle of gentilism, they were cannibals and sacrificed men and women to idols, some of which were identical with those of Mexico. The Mayas had no conception of property in land; their buildings were great communal houses, like pueblos; in some cases these so-called palaces, at first supposed to be scanty remnants of vast cities, were themselves the entire "cities;" in other cases there were doubtless large composite pueblos fit to be called cities.

[Footnote 145: This writing was at once recognized by learned Spaniards, like Las Casas, as entirely different from anything found elsewhere in America. He found in Yucatan "letreros de ciertos caracteres que en otra ninguna parte," Las Casas, Historia apologetica, cap. cxxiii. For an account of the hieroglyphics, see the learned essays of Dr. Cyrus Thomas, A Study of the Manuscript Troano, Washington, 1882; "Notes on certain Maya and Mexican MSS.," Third Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, pp. 7-153; "Aids to the Study of the Maya Codices," Sixth Report, pp. 259-371. (The paper last mentioned ends with the weighty words, "The more I study these characters the stronger becomes the conviction that they have grown out of a pictographic system similar to that common among the Indians of North America." Exactly so; and this is typical of every aspect and every detail of ancient American culture. It is becoming daily more evident that the old notion of an influence from Asia has not a leg to stand on.) See also a suggestive paper by the astronomer, E. S. Holden, "Studies in Central American Picture-Writing," First Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, pp. 205-245; Brinton, Ancient Phonetic Alphabet of Yucatan, New York, 1870; Essays of an Americanist, Philadelphia, 1890, pp. 193-304; Leon de Rosny, Les ecritures figuratives, Paris, 1870; L'interpretation des anciens textes Mayas, Paris, 1875; Essai sur le dechiffrement de l'ecriture hieratique de l'Amerique Centrale, Paris, 1876; Foerstemann, Erlaeuterungen der Maya Handschrift, Dresden, 1886. The decipherment is as yet but partially accomplished. The Mexican system of writing is clearly developed from the ordinary Indian pictographs; it could not have arisen from the Maya system, but the latter might well have been a further development of the Mexican system; the Maya system had probably developed some characters with a phonetic value, i. e. was groping toward the alphabetical stage; but how far this groping had gone must remain very doubtful until the decipherment has proceeded further. Dr. Isaac Taylor is too hasty in saying that "the Mayas employed twenty-seven characters which must be admitted to be alphabetic" (Taylor, The Alphabet, vol. i. p. 24); this statement is followed by the conclusion that the Maya system of writing was "superior in simplicity and convenience to that employed ... by the great Assyrian nation at the epoch of its greatest power and glory." Dr. Taylor has been misled by Diego de Landa, whose work (Relation des choses de l'Yucatan, ed. Brasseur, Paris, 1864) has in it some pitfalls for the unwary.]