Page:The rise and fall of the Emperor Maximilian.djvu/96

 occurred to any but a civilised people. The same observation may be applied to the structure of the aqueducts, or conduits, by which they conveyed a stream of fresh water from a considerable distance into the city, along one of the causeways. The appointment of a number of persons to clean the streets, to light them by fires kindled in different places, and to patrol as watchmen during the night, discovers a degree of attention which even polished nations are late in acquiring.'

We think that Mexico would perhaps have been the gainer by going back to its 'iron age.' Be that as it may, did not the posterity of these so-called barbarians deserve a better fate than that which bound them as serfs to the soil, and condemned them to the duties of beasts of burden? These were the people who formed the brilliant cortege which welcomed the emperor and empress when they ascended the road from Orizaba to Mexico; they had exhumed all their old ornaments, the relics of bygone splendour, in order to do honour to the descendant of Charles V.

Maximilian, who might have made amends for the crime of his royal ancestor, committed the error, when he dismissed them from the capital, of not sending away to their homes as freemen these victims to the conquests of the sixteenth century. It would have been a princely mode of inaugurating his reign.

It was not until the end of September 1865 that, thinking better of it, he issued a decree which pronounced the emancipation of the Indian peons as well as the extinction of their past debts; debts often both usurious and disgraceful, which inflicted bondage on the babe yet unborn. This liberal and humane measure will ever remain to the honour of Maximilian—it ought to have sufficed to disarm his judges at