Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/95

Rh field offer very tempting, and to some extent rewarding, subjects for curious research and ingenious theory. But the theories crumble like the relics which we handle. The claim of having attained a state of civilization can be sustained for the Mexicans only by resting on the unsatisfactory plea that there is no sharp, positive line or point which divides barbarism from civilization. Prescott says that the civilization of Mexico was equivalent to that of England under Alfred, and similar to that of ancient and modern Egypt. The basis of this estimate is, that the Mexicans had made an advance on a nomadic life as hunters, and were fixed cultivators of the soil, raising corn, cotton, and vegetables, with skilled manufactures, with adobe dwellings, with hieroglyphical records for their annals; and that they showed architectural skill, as also ingenuity in a method of irrigating their fields.

After making due allowance for the pure fictions and the proved exaggerations of the early Spanish chroniclers, all that seems certified to us about the husbandry and manufactures, the palatial and ceremonial pomp, and the forms of law among the Mexicans, would not set them beyond that state which, when speaking of Orientals, we call barbaric.

It can hardly be allowed that a people are in any appreciable stage of civilization who offer human sacrifices and eat human flesh. Nor does it much relieve the matter to suggest that the latter hideous practice did not indicate a cannibal relish for such viands, but was simply incident to the previous religious ceremonial of offering human victims in sacrifice. The evidence seems sufficient that human flesh was a marketable commodity in Mexico, having a place with other food at the shambles; and that dainty dishes of it were daily served among the hundred courses on Montezuma's table. Peter Martyr tells us how “the hellish butchers,” as he calls them, prepared it. The blood of infants was used in the composition of