Page:Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines.djvu/311

 life, and more particularly, of the dinner, which will now be considered. It is worth the attempt to take up the pictures of these and succeeding authors, and see whether the real truth of the matter cannot be elicited from their own statements. There was undoubtedly a basis of facts underneath them, because without such a basis the superstructure could not have been created.

It may with reason be supposed that the Spaniards found Montezuma, with his gentile kindred, in a large joint-tenement house, containing perhaps fifty or a hundred families united in a communal household The dinner they witnessed was the single daily meal of this household, prepared in a common cook-house from common stores, and divided at the kettle. The dinner of each person was placed in an earthern bowl, with which in his hand an Indian needed neither chair nor table, and, moreover, had neither the one nor the other. The men ate first, and by themselves, Indian fashion; and the women, of whom only a few were seen, afterwards and by themselves. On this hypothesis the dinner in question is susceptible of a satisfactory explanation

It has been shown that each Aztec community of persons owned lands in common, from which they derived their support. Their mode of tillage and of distribution of the products, whatever it may have been, would have returned to each family or household, large or small, its rightful share. Communism in living in large households composed of related families springs naturally from such a soil. It may be considered a law of their condition, and, plainly enough, the most economical mode of life they could adopt until the idea of property had been sufficiently developed in their minds to lead to the division of lands among individuals with ownership in fee, and power of alienation. Their social system, which tended to unite kindred families in a common household, their ownership of lands in common, and their ownership, as a group, of a joint-tenement house, which would necessarily follow, would not admit a right in persons to sell, and thus to introduce strangers into the ownership of such lands or such houses. Lands and houses were owned and held under a common system which entered into their plan of life. The idea of property was forming in their minds, but it was still in that immature state which pertains to the Middle