Page:About Mexico - Past and Present.djvu/75

Rh people and filled with their gods. These senseless blocks of wood and stone were prisoners, and as such were punished severely when the tribe they represented rebelled. The victors sought to make the worship of these captured idols acceptable by stationing in each such building priests from the tribe from which the idols were taken.

At the time of the Spanish invasion the whole country seemed to be on the eve of one of those terrible conflicts by which some of the fairest portions of the earth had been desolated. The Aztecs had maintained their supremacy for nearly a hundred years, and now the tribes far and near, outraged by their oppressions, were brooding over their wrongs, awaiting some leader who should head a new confederacy and mete out justice to Mexico. She was drunk with human blood, and the tide of war was turning—as, in time, it always will turn against a people whose only right is might. Unheard by it, God had said of the beautiful Aztec city, as he had said of Babylon of old, "The cup which she hath filled, fill to her double."