Page:Reviews of Bancroft's History of the Pacific States from British Quarterly Review and London Times.pdf/6

 ness was no doubt due to their remarkable presentiment of a coming white man who should subdue them; but it is evident that they were in some things superior to the Spaniards, who carried corruption with them. The well-known story of diplomacy and craft and bloodshed has never been told with more comprehensive grasp of detail, or a more simple, vigorous, and massive style. Mr Bancroft, if he has not said the final word about the conquest of Mexico, has rendered further research almost a work of supererogation. In nothing is he more instructive than in his constant and careful tracing out of the work of the Church as it followed in the wake of the work of conquest. Let these two passages stand side by side—"Ah, it was pitiful life to the Aztecs now, this world a great charnel-house, filled with the bones of their loved ones, and their hearts dead, though still bleeding. What were their sins more than others that they should be so stricken, that they should be so ground to the dust, while the conquerors, flushed with victory, were exulting before God because He had so ordered and accomplished. They had sacrificed human beings on the altars of their gods—sixty thousand in one year, some said. But what were these butcheries of the Spaniards but human sacrifices of more than six times sixty thousand in one generation ? Behold them as they file along causeway, the very sun striking black and stilling on their famine-stricken forms and agonized faces. On them, then, ye conquerors, complete your work; for in its swift continuance is their earlier rest! And this—"And all along through the century we nave seen explorers and conquerors, city-builders and miners, side by side with self-denying and exemplary friars, who, while replacing a cruel and debasing worship with a gentler faith, sought to ameliorate the condition of their charge, ever mysteriously fading into the immaterial before their pitying yes. Meanwhile able men appear at the head of ecclesiastical affairs, and the Church riser into power, gaining for the millions lost in the Old World millions in the New."

Mr Hubert Bancroft proceeds successfully in his gigantic enterprise. He now presents us with two more bulky volumes, pack-full of facts, solidly earnest, if not always eloquent in style, and giving on every page the proof not only of exhaustive study of documents, but of knowledge of human nature, power of penetrating motives, and capacity to paint individual portraits with decision, and with that comprehensiveness of spirit which is so essential to the historian in enabling him to subordinate biography to history. Macaulay and Carlyle both tend to transform history into a series of biographies, and Sir Arthur Helps to a great extent failed as an historian from his desire to find a preconceived idea fulfilled in certain typical men. American writers like Prescott and Bancroft have, on the whole, been more successful as historians, if less gifted as artists and thinkers; and Mr Hubert Bancroft is, in several respects, a worthy successor to them. In addition to the voluminous authorities which he cited in the beginning of his first volume, he gives a supplemental list to each of these volumes embracing whole libraries; and his chapter of Appendix to his Second Volume, summarizing so neatly the "Bibliography of Voyage Collections, is an excellent example of a kind of work which only a true historian could do, but which too often the historians neglect for more showy and eloquent composition.