Page:Letters of Cortes to Emperor Charles V - Vol 1.djvu/56

36 his own superior virtues. Prescott was uncertain whether this submission to a public whipping should be attributed to "bigotry" or to "policy." It seems to have been first of all an act of simple consistency by which the commander sanctioned the law he had himself established. Precept is ever plentiful but example is the better teacher, and a more striking and unforgetable example of the equality of all under the law, it would indeed be difficult to find in history. The policy of demonstrating that no one's faults were exempt from the punishment provided by the law was unquestionably present, and deserving only of applause, but for bigotry there seems to be no place whatever, unless indeed the provision of compulsory instruction for both the natives and the Spaniards in Christian doctrine be so described.

His religious zeal was sometimes intemperate, nor was it always guided by prudence, but he usually showed wisdom in submitting to the restraining influence of some handy friar whose saner and more persuasive methods promised surer results than his own strenuous system of conversion would have secured. Nowhere is the vindication of the religious orders in dealing with native races more convincingly established than in the history of their early relations with the Mexicans. The restraints the commander placed on the license of his soldiers might well have been prompted by his policy of winning the friendly confidence of the Indians, but his measures for repressing profanity of every sort, gambling and other camp vices, and his insistence upon daily mass and prayer before and thanksgivings after battle, are traceable to no such motive, and it is more than once recorded that the Indians were profoundly impressed by the decorous solemnity of the religious ceremonies and the devotion shown by the Spaniards.

Shortcomings in the practice of the moral precepts of religion, either in that century or in this, are not