Page:About Mexico - Past and Present.djvu/104

96 whole community had a claim upon him in his day of triumph and home-coming. The council of his kindred had named him at birth, educated him, trained him for war, chosen him a wife and married him to her, and they would bury him when he died; and it was easy to see that duty to them came before all other duties. The habit of giving descriptive titles was shown in the name applied to the merchant. He was called "the man who exchanges one thing for another," or "the man who gets more than he gives."

Most of the commerce of the country was carried on in the way of barter. The artisan brought his own wares to the town market-place and exchanged them for whatever he wanted of his neighbor's goods of equal value. The money was cacao-beans, put up in small bags or lots of eight thousand. Expensive articles were paid for in grains of gold, which was passed from hand to hand in quills. Sometimes pieces of cotton cloth were used, or bits of copper instead of coin.

The market-place was a great open square surrounded by wide corridors, where vendersvendors [sic] sat with their goods protected from the weather. Cortez thus describes the market-place in the City of Mexico as he saw it in 1519:

"This city has many public squares, in which are situated the markets and other places for buying and selling. There is one square, twice as large as that of the city of Salamanca, surrounded by porticoes, where are daily assembled more than sixty thousand souls engaged in buying and selling, and where are found all kinds of merchandise that the world affords, embracing the necessaries of life—as, for instance, articles of food as well as jewels of gold and silver, lead, brass, copper, tin, precious stones,