Page:Mexico, Aztec, Spanish and Republican, Vol 1.djvu/87





is perhaps one of the most difficult duties of a historian, who desires to present a faithful picture of a remote age, to place himself in such a position as to draw the moral from his story with justice to the people and the deeds he has described. He is obliged to forget, not only his individuality and all the associations or prejudices with which he has grown up surrounded, but he must, in fact, endeavor to make himself a man and an actor in the age of which he writes. He must sympathize justly, but impartially, with the past, and estimate the motives of his fellow beings in the epoch he describes. He must measure his heroes, not by the standard of advanced Christian civilization under which he has been educated, but by the scale of enlightened opinion which was then acknowledged by the most respectable and intellectual classes of society.

When we approach the Conquest of Mexico with these impartial feelings, we are induced to pass lighter judgments on the prominent men of that wonderful enterprise. The love of adventure or glory, the passion of avarice, and the zeal of religion,—all of which mingled their threads with the meshes of this Indian web, were, unquestionably, the predominant motives that led the conquerors to Mexico. In some of them, a single one of these impulses was sufficient to set the bold adventurer in motion;—in others, perhaps, they were all combined. The necessary rapidity of our narrative has confined us more to the detail of prominent incidents than we would have desired had it been our task to disclose the wondrous tale of the conquest alone; but it would be wrong, even in