Page:Letters of Cortes to Emperor Charles V - Vol 1.djvu/357

and ferocious, fear was the motive of worship, human sacrifice the only means of placating the gods, and thus religion, which should soften and humanise manners and elevate character, was engulfed in a dreadful superstition, which held the nation in a state of permanent degradation, with the result that the most civilised amongst the Indians of North America were at the same time the most barbarous. The perfect ordering of this system impressed the Spaniards, while its awful rites horrified them.

Their state was well ordered, and, in many respects, governed according to wise and enlightened standards, and that their civilisation was of no mean order is proven by the following factors in it:

I.	The rights of private property were recognised and respected; its transfer was effected by sale or inheritance.
II.	All free men were land owners, either by absolute possession or by usufruct derived from holding some public office in the state, and these composed the nobility: others held land in community, parcels being allotted to a given number of families, whose members worked them in common and shared their produce equitably.
III.	Taxes were levied according to an established system and were paid in kind, thus filling the government store-houses with vast accumulations of all the products of the Empire.
IV.	Justice was administered by regularly appointed judges, who interpreted the laws and exercised jurisdiction in different districts.
V.	Markets were held as Cortes describes.
VI.	The streets were regularly cleaned, lighted by fires at night, and patrolled by police; public sanitary arrangements were provided, and the city was probably more spacious, cleaner, and healthier than any European towns of that time.
VII.	Public charity provided hospitals for the sick and aged.
VIII.	Separate arts and trades flourished, and the metal-workers, lapidaries, weavers, etc., learned their trades by a regular system of instruction and apprenticeship pretty much as in the guilds of Europe.
IX.	The great public-works, such as the causeways, aqueducts, canals with locks, and bridges, were admirably constructed, and, in the neighbourhood of the capital at least, were numerous.
X.	There was a fair knowledge of the medicinal and curative properties of herbs, barks, roots, and plants, though, if the medicine men were skilled in the use of poisons, it seems strange that they did not rid themselves of the hungry invaders at some of the feasts which were constantly offered them.
XI.	In the arts, the lapidaries, feather-workers, and silversmiths produced the best work. Mexican paintings, judged as works of art, are crude and primitive enough, but their real value and interest lie in the fact that they are chronicles in picture writing, of which, unfortunately, too few have been preserved; ideas were rarely and imperfectly represented by this method, which was only serviceable for recording material facts. Music was the least developed of all the arts.