Page:About Mexico - Past and Present.djvu/71

Rh broke on their homes, came back—if they came at all—to a scene of utter desolation.

But war did not always end thus. When a tribe refused to pay a valuable tribute, no attempt was made to destroy it, but merely to force obedience. The Aztecs once paid tribute to the Tepanacs, a tribe on the mainland, near Mexico. When their city became strong enough to rebel, a struggle took place for the mastery, in which the Aztecs were victorious. The immediate cause of this war was the possession of the great spring at Chapultepec, by which the city was supplied with water through an aqueduct. As this was on the yaotlalli, or neutral ground, between the Aztecs and Tepanacs, any attempt of the latter to cut off the water-supply of Mexico was taken as a challenge to war. Their success in this struggle made the Aztecs the leading power in the tableland. They became the head of a strong confederacy of tribes, and ruled with a high hand for nearly a hundred years, until, hated and feared by all their neighbors and crushed at home by the despotism of the council, the Aztecs were ripe for rebellion, and their beautiful domain fell an easy prey into the hands of the foreign invaders.

It is said that when Montezuma was asked why he had suffered the little republic of Tlascala to lift a defiant head between Mexico and the sea, he replied that the Aztecs would have crushed it long ago but that they needed victims for sacrifice and could get them readily in the skirmishes which constantly took place between the two tribes. Thus, with war as their chief business in life and a religion which demanded thousands of human sacrifices yearly, the Aztecs were glad of any pretext for an attack on their neighbors. The choice of a new war-chief was sure to bring on a