matters in the ancient empire of the Aztecs have taken, not in the time immediately subsequent to the conquest, regarding which various Spanish and foreign scholars have already written. In their writings, one can encounter repeated facts that will confirm those that form the picture I am going to present to my readers and which, perhaps, will shed more light on important political
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questions which will doubtless recur successively in the course of the coming times. Is it not true that the heterogeneity of the elements that have made up European societies in different epochs has entered into the calculations and measures of their legislators and leaders in organizing their progress? The history of the middle age, of this period of grand vices and heroic virtues, of ignorance, energy, and universal upheaval, teaching statesmen what the basic parts that make up the nations they governed have been, showed them at the same time the different sources that are the basis of the rights or the aspirations of each class, of each hierarchy, of each family. In Spanish America, where there were no other foreign invaders, nor that tumultuous invasion of semisavage nations, we must assume that the conquistador laid down the law without conditions, and peaceably used the right of force with no restrictions except those to which he would subject himself.
The historians of the conquest of Mexico have given to their accounts an air of exaggeration that has been the origin of many ridiculous fables and amusing romances. The most judicious writers have not been able to protect themselves from giving credit to some entirely false and even absurd facts, which has led them into errors of great consequence. We can affirm that no history has been more adorned with illusions, hyper-bole, romantic stories, and episodes than that of those far-off lands, the distance and isolation in which the policy of the Spanish government maintained them causing almost the same results as those the heroic times produced. Cortés himself, in his letters to Carlos V, paints pictures so flattering, so poetic and extraordinary of what he had seen and conquered with his fearless companions, that it was difficult not to believe oneself transported to a new world, to a land similar to and even superior to the imaginary Atlantis, or to those lands of gold, incense, and aromas of which Eastern writers speak. Magnificent palaces covered with gold and silver; kings and emperors richer than the most powerful potentates of Europe; temples comparable to those of ancient Greece; rivers that carried grains of the most precious metals and emeralds and diamonds instead of stones; extraordinary birds, monstrous quadrupeds; men of different physiognomy due to their features, color, lack of beard, and bristly hair; climates in which one breathes a fiery atmosphere or in which a perpetual spring represents the closest image of paradise. A religion made up of the most ridiculous and horrible ceremonies; a worship whose dogmas are a monstrous mix of everything that had been regarded
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as the most bizarre. All of this, partly true, waxing in the pens of writers, came to produce indelible impressions in Europe. But, how differently were these same things seen in those lands!
The Spanish conquest in America reduced the Indians to such a state of slavery that each white man considered himself to have the right to be served by the indigenous, without the indigenous having either courage to object or even the capacity to assert any right. Those who escaped the effects of the first slaughters were distributed among the conquistadors. In the beginning, there were only masters and servants. The authorities did not govern by laws, of which there were none, but rather in the name of the king. Later they were given those ordinances that they called the Laws of the Indies, which had as their goal moderating the tyranny of the descendants of the conquistadors and of the chieftains who left Spain to govern those lands. But inasmuch as the only ones who had those laws or royal decrees were those who were to execute them, in reality there did not exist anything but the will of the captains general, viceroys, or governors. Distributions of territories were in part converted into encomiendas, which had as its final result the payment of an annual tribute to the holders of the encomiendas, who were like the borough mongers in England. Later the kings reduced these privileged ones to receiving from the royal treasury the amount equal to the annual yield of the tributes they collected from the Indians who were their share in the original distributions, eliminating, in this way, much ill treatment produced by the method of collecting it, an abuse that later was adopted by the subdelegates and chief magistrates charged with collecting levies from the Indians, who were obligated to deliver them in kind, that is to say, in ordinary fabrics of cotton that their women wore or in other similar manufactured goods.
The Indians had their special laws, their judges, their attorneys and defense counsels that the government named for them because, legally, they were considered minors. The state of brutishness in which it kept them made them, in effect, unfit to demand any kind of rights or to enter into important contracts, which assumed the need for some complex ideas. Those who have tried to defend the policy of the Spanish government with respect to its colonies have cited the existence of this Code of the Indies that seems to have been formed as a bastion of protection on behalf of the Indians. But those who examine the questions
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from a philosophical point of view have considered this institute only as a system of slavery established on seemingly indestructible bases, and from whose effects those governments will continue to suffer for some centuries. In effect, those laws are nothing but a prescribed method of domination over the Indians. They take for granted, in the monarchs that issued them, rights over the goods and lives of the conquered ones, and consequently any act that was not absolutely an oppression was deemed in them a favor, a benefit from the legislator. There were laws that determined the weight with which they could be burdened, the distances they could go, what they had to be paid, etc. etc. So as to maintain this systematic order of oppression, it was necessary that the oppressed were never able to enter, so to speak, into the rational world, into the moral sphere in which other men live. In the majority of the provinces, they did not know, nor do they yet know, any language but their own, which is generally different from the others. The language (without excepting Mexican, which some novelists have pompously praised) is impoverished and lacks words to express abstract ideas. The speeches historians or poets imagine to have come from the mouths of the Jicotencales, Magiscatzines, and Colocolos are no more genuine than those that Homer, Virgil, and Livy attribute to the Agamemnons, Turnuses, or Scaevolas. Those Indian chiefs were as, or perhaps more barbarous than these Greek and Roman heroes, and their language could not lend itself to the beautiful oratories that a long sequence of centuries of civilization and regular governments assume.
It is certain that Spanish America before the conquest was more populated than today and that the Indians under their national governments began to develop some ideas. They had confused notions regarding the immortality of the soul, they had made a small number of observations, although highly imperfect, regarding the course of the stars, they were not completely lacking in the art of working metal. But such knowledge remained in its cradle, and now it is known how many centuries are necessary for peoples to attain the level of perfection that would allow them to deserve the title of civilized. The conquest destroyed entirely this movement that began to give flight to the spirit of invention among those indigenous peoples. A new worship as well as an unknown government substituted the bloody superstitions of Huitzilipoxtli and the patriarchal regimes of the Guatimocines and Moctezumas. The images of the saints and gods of the Roman Catholics were put in places that
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had previously been occupied by the horrible idols of the Aztecs; and the defenders of the conquistadors will not be able to deny, even if it is painful to admit it, that the Indians also had their martyrs, sacrificed because of the religious zeal of the Roman priests, because of the tenacious adherence of many of them to their ancient worship. But eventually force and terror triumphed over fanaticism for a religion that had against it the horrific dogma of demanding human victims. On the other hand, the Indians encountered much more perfect images than their monstrous idols, and the change was not very difficult, moving to our saints the ceremonies and tributes that they made to their gods. The assistance
