filling the terraces with rich earth. They excavated pits in
the sand, surrounded them with adobe walls, and filled them
with manured soil. On the low level they cultivated bananas
and cassava; on the terraces above, maize and quinoa; still
higher, tobacco; and above that, the potato. From a com-
paratively limited surface, they raised great crops by judiciously
using manures, employing for that purpose fish, and especially
guano. Their example has led to the use of the latter sub-
stance for a like purpose in our own times in Europe. The
whole civilized world has followed them in the cultivation of
the potato.
The Peruvian bark is one of the most invaluable
remedies. Large tracts of North America would be almost
uninhabitable without the use of its active alkaloid, quinine,
which actually, in no insignificant manner, reduces the per-
centage mortality throughout the United States.

suya.

Indispensably necessary to their agricultural system were The great aqueduct their great water-works. In Spain there was nothing worthy of Condeof being compared with them. The aqueduct of Condesuya was nearly five hundred miles long. Its engineers had overcome difficulties in a manner that might well strike modern times with admiration. Its water was distributed as prescribed by law; there were officers to see to its proper use. From these great

water-works, and from their roads, it may be judged that the architectural skill of the Peruvians was far from insignificant. They constructed edifices of porphyry, granite, brick; but their buildings were for the most part low, and suitable to an earthquake country.

of human

ways the

I have dwelt at some length on the domestic history of The stages Mexico and Peru because it is intimately connected with one developeof the philosophical principles which it is the object of this ment albook to teach, viz. that human progress takes place under an same. unvarying law, and therefore in a definite way. The trivial incidents mentioned in the preceding paragraphs may perhaps have seemed insignificant or wearisome, but it is their very commonness, their very familiarity, that gives them, when rightly considered, a surprising interest. There is nothing in these minute details but what we find to be perfectly natural from the European point of view. They might be, for that

Analogy between societies of men and societies of animals.

The crime of Spain in America.

matter, instead of reminiscences of the spontaneous evolution
of a people shut out from the rest of the world by impassable
oceans, a relation of the progress of some European or Asiatic
nation. The man of America proceeded forward in his course
of civilization as did the man of the Old World, devising the
same institutions, guided by the same intentions, constrained
by the same desires. From the great features of his social
system down to the little details of his domestic life, there is
a sameness with what was done in Asia, Africa, Europe. But
similar results imply a similar cause. What, then, is there
possessed in common by the Chinese, the Hindoo, the Egyp-
tian, the European, the American? Surely not climate, nor
equal necessities, nor equal opportunity. Simply nothing but
this-corporeal organization! As automatons constructed in
the same way will do the same things, so, in organic forms,
sameness of structure will give rise to identity of function and
similarity of acts. The same common sense guides men all
over the world. Common sense is a function of common or-
ganization. All natural history is full of illustrations. It
may be offensive to our pride, but it is none the less true, that,
in his social progress, the free-will of which man so boasts him-
self in his individual capacity disappears as an active influence,
and the domination of general and inflexible laws becomes
manifest. The free-will of the individual is supplanted by
instinct and automatism in the race. To each individual bee
the career is
open; he may taste of this flower, and avoid that;
he may be industrious in the garden, or idle away his time in
the air; but the history of one hive is the history of another
hive; there will be a predestined organization—the queen, the
drones, the workers. In the midst of a thousand unforeseen,
uncalculated, variable acts, a definite result, with unerring cer-
tainty, emerges; the combs are built in a preordained way,
and filled with honey at last. From bees, and wasps, and ants,
and birds-from all that low animal life on which he looks
with such supercilious contempt, man is destined one day to
learn what in truth he really is.

For a second reason also I have dwelt on these details. The enormous crime of Spain in destroying this civilization has

of Men and Animals.

niard and

183 never yet been appreciated in Europe. After an attentive The Spaconsideration of the facts of the case, I agree in the conclusion the Ameriof Carli, that at the time of the conquest the moral man in can. Peru was superior to the European, and, I will add, the intellectual man also. In Spain, or even in all Europe, was there to be found a political system carried out into the practical details of actual life, and expressed in great public works as its outward, visible, and enduring sign, which could at all compare with that of Peru? Its only competitor was the Italian system, but that for long had been actively used to repress the intellectual advancement of man. In vain the Spaniards excuse their atrocities on the plea that a nation like the Mexican, which permitted cannibalism, should not be regarded as having emerged from the barbarous state; and that one which, like Peru, sacrificed human hecatombs at the funeral solemnities of great men, must have been savage. Let it be remembered that there is no civilized nation whose popular practices do not lag behind its intelligence; let it be remembered that in this respect Spain herself also was guilty. In America, human European and Amerisacrifice was part of a religious solemnity, unstained by pas- can human sion. The auto da fé of Europe was a dreadful cruelty; not an offering to heaven, but a gratification of spite, hatred, fear, vengeance-the most malignant passions of earth. There was no spectacle on the American continent at which a just man might so deeply blush for his race as that presented in Western Europe when the heretic, from whom confession had been wrung by torture, passed to his stake in a sleeveless garment, with flames of fire and effigies of an abominable import depicted upon it. Let it be remembered that by the Inquisition, from 1481 to 1808, 340,000 persons had been punished, and of these nearly 32,000 burnt. Let what was done in the south of France be remembered. Let it be also remembered that, considering the worthlessness of the body of man, and that, at the best, it is at last food for the worm,-considering the infinite value of his immortal soul, for the redemption of which the agony and death of the Son of God were not too great a price to pay, indignities offered to the body are less wicked than indignities offered to the soul. It would be well for him

sacrifices.

Antiquity of Ameri

can civili

zation.

184

Antiquity of American Civilization.

who comes forward as an accuser of Mexico and Peru in their sin, to dispose of the fact that at that period the entire authority of Europe was directed to the perversion, and even total repression of thought,-to an enslaving of the mind, and making that noblest creation of Heaven a worthless machine. To taste of human flesh is less criminal in the eye of God than to stifle human thought.

Lastly, there is another point, to which I will with brevity allude. It has been widely asserted that Mexican and Peruvian civilization was altogether a recent affair, dating at most only two or three centuries before the conquest. It would be just as well to say that there was no civilization in India before the time of the Macedonian invasion because there exist no historic documents in that country anterior to that event. The Mexicans and Peruvians were not heroes of a romance, to whom wonderful events were of common occurrence, whose lives were regulated by laws not applying to the rest of the human race, who could produce results in a day for which elsewhere a thousand years are required. They were men and women like ourselves, slowly and painfully, and with many failures, working out their civilization. The summary manner in which they have been disposed of reminds us of the amusing way in which the popular chronology deals with the hoary annals of Egypt and China. Putting aside the imperfect methods of recording events practised by the autochthons of the Western world, he who estimates rightly the slowness with which man passes forward in his process of civilization, and collates therewith the prodigious works of art left by those two nations-an enduring evidence of the point to which they had attained-will find himself constrained to cast aside such idle assertions as altogether unworthy of confutation, or even of attention.

CHAPTER XX.

APPROACH OF THE AGE OF REASON IN EUROPE.

IT IS PRECEDED BY THE RISE OF CRITICISM.

criticism.

N estimating the influences of literature on the approach of The rise of the Age of Reason in Europe, the chief incidents to be considered are the disuse of Latin as a learned language, the formation of modern tongues from the vulgar dialects, the invention of printing, the decline of the power of the pulpit, and its displacement by that of the press. These, joined to the moral and intellectual influences at that time predominating, led to the great movement known as the Reformation.

the intel

movement.

As if to mark out to the world the real cause of its intel- Epoch of lectual degradation, the regeneration of Italy commenced with lectual the exile of the Popes to Avignon. During their absence, so rapid was the progress that it had become altogether impossible to make any successful resistance, or to restore the old condition of things on their return to Rome. The moment that the leaden cloud which they had kept suspended over the country was withdrawn, the light from heaven shot in, and the ready peninsula became instinct with life.

Latin as a

guage.

The unity of the Church, and therefore its power, required Use of the use of Latin as a sacred language. Through this Rome sacred lanhad stood in an attitude strictly European, and was enabled to maintain a general international relation. It gave her far more power than her asserted celestial authority, and, much as she claims to have done, she is open to condemnation that, with such a signal advantage in her hands, never again to be enjoyed by any successor, she did not accomplish much more.