Page:Vol 1 History of Mexico by H H Bancroft.djvu/282

162 who in return now determine their overthrow. And shall they consent! Alas, they are weak, and their gods are weak!

Heathenism, with its idolatry, and bloody sacrifices, and cannibalism, is horrible, I grant you. "For daily they sacrificed three or five Indians," says Bernal Diaz, "offering the heart to idols, smearing the blood upon the walls, and cutting off the limbs to be eaten. I even believe they sold the flesh in the market." But equally horrible, and far more unfair, are the doings of the superior race, which with the advance of the centuries, and the increase of knowledge and refinement, are often guilty of deeds as bloodthirsty and cruel as these. With the most powerful of microscopic aids to vision, I can see no difference between the innate goodness and badness of men ow and two or five thousand years ago; the difference lies merely in a change of morality fashions, and in the apparent refining and draping of what conventionally we choose to call wickedness. What is the serving of dainty dishes to the gods in the form of human sacrifices, of carving before them a few thousand fattened captives, to the extirpation of a continent of helpless human beings; and that by such extremes of treachery and cruelty as the cannibals never dreamed of, entrapping by fair words only to cut, and mangle, and kill by steel, saltpetre, and blood-hounds; stealing at the same time their lands and goods, and adding still more to their infamy by doing all this in the name of Christ; when in reality they violate every principle of religion and disregard every injunction of the church; just as men to-day lie and cheat and praise and pray, and out of their swindlings hope to buy favor of the Ålmighty!

And now these poor people must give up their poor gods, for their masters so decree. The chiefs and