Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/96

76 cakes: some of these were once sent as a propitiatory offering to Cortes. It may be urged that even these practices do not bar a claim to a stage of civilization, if we still allow the term where superstition about God and cruelty towards men match the most foul and atrocious practices of savages.

There are not lacking in our voluminous literature on this subject — representing, as it does, the diversity of opinions and judgments passed on the methods of the Spanish invaders, as presented in different aspects — pleadings reducing or palliating the atrocities which to us seem unrelieved, as springing from a ruthless cruelty. Humboldt says that we must allow in them for other and less mean passions than rapacity and fanaticism. Tracing these passions and others associated with them to their springs, they may be found to have arisen, and to have been intensified in their indulgence, by what we may call — though we can but vaguely define it — the chivalric spirit of the people and the age. This spirit — associated with crusades and religious wars, with the embittered hate of Moslems and Jews, with daring and reckless enterprises of adventure, with utter fearlessness in risking one's own limbs and life, and with a burning emulation of achievement through prowess and desperate endeavor — was transferred from its old, familiar, and comparatively exhausted fields to wholly new scenes, materials, and opportunities. These seem to have presented to the Spaniards no incitements to mental activity, to curious inquiries as to the antecedents of their new surroundings, to speculative or scientific investigations. All these intellectual instigations and processes, which have been so sedulously and ingeniously exercised under the quickening influences of the modern expansion of intelligence, had no attraction for those of such inert and undeveloped natures as marked the heterogeneous companies of adventurers flocking here with untrained principles and under the spell of the wildest impulses.