sented. The explorers reasoned, just as students reasoned for more than three centuries longer, that structures so vast could only have been erected by despotism. They saw an empire where there was no empire; they supposed themselves in the presence of a society like their own; all their descriptions were cast in the mould of this society, and the mould remained unbroken until the civilized world rediscovered the pueblos.

Again, so long as the Pueblo Indians were unknown to us, there appeared an impassable gap between the roving Indians of the North and the more advanced race that Cortez conquered. Yet writers had long since pointed out the seeming extravagance of the Spanish descriptions, the exaggeration of their statistics. In the celebrated Spanish narrative of Montezuma's banquet, Bernal Diaz, writing thirty years after the event, describes four women as bringing water to their chief—an occurrence not at all improbable. In the account by Herrera, written still later, the four have increased to twenty. According to Diaz, Montezuma had 200 of his nobility on guard in the palace; Cortez expands this to 600, and Herrera to 3000. Zuazo, describing the pueblo or town of Mexico in 1521, attributed to it 60,000 inhabitants, and the "anonymous conqueror" who was with Cortez wrote the same. This estimate Morgan believes to have been twice too large; but Gomara and Peter Martyr transformed the inhabitants into housesthe estimate which Prescott followed-while Torquemada, cited by Clavigero, goes still further, and writes 120,000 houses. Supposing that, as seems probable, the Mexican houses were of the communal type, holding fifty or a hundred persons each, we

have an original population of perhaps 30,000 swollen to 6,000,000. These facts illustrate the extravagances of statement to which the study of the New Mexican pueblos has largely put an end. This study has led us to abate much of the exaggeration with which the ancient Mexican society has been treated, and on the other hand to do justice to the more advanced among the tribes of northern Indians. The consequence is that the two types appear less unlike each other than was formerly supposed.

Let us compare the habits of the Pueblo Indians with those of more northern tribes. Lewis and Clark thus describe a village of the Chopunish, or Nez Percés, on the Columbia River:

"The village of Tunnachemootoolt is in fact only a single house 150 feet long, built after the Chopunish fashion with sticks, straw, and dried grass. It contains twenty-four fires, about double that number of families, and might perhaps muster 100 fightingmen."

This represents a communal household of nearly five hundred people, and another great house of the same race (Nechecolees) was still larger, being 226 feet in length. The houses of the Iroquois were 100 feet long. The Creeks, the Mandans, the Sacs, the Mohaves, and other tribes lived in a similar communal way, several related families in each house, living and eating in common. All these built their houses of perishable materials; some arranged them for defence, others did not, but all the structures bear a certain analogy to each other, and even, when carefully considered, to the pueblos of New Mexico.

Compare, for instance, a ground-plan of one of the Chopunish houses among the Nechecolees with that

of an Iroquois house and with a New Mexican pueblo, and one is struck with the resemblance. All these houses seem obviously adapted to a communal life, and traces of this practice, varying in different places,

96 Ft.

PLAN OF IROQUOIS HOUSE

226 Ft.

PLAN OF NECHECOLEE HOUSE

come constantly before us. The Pueblo Indians, like other tribes, hold their lands in common. The traveller Stephens saw near the ruins of Uxmal the food of a hundred laboring-men prepared at one hut, and each family sending for its own portion-“a procession of women and children, each carrying a smoking bowl of hot broth, all coming down the same path, and dispersing among the huts." But this description might easily be paralleled among northern tribes. I will not dwell on the complex laws of descent and relationship, which are so elaborately described by Morgan in his Ancient Society, and which appear to have prevailed in general among all the aboriginal clans. The essential result of all these various observations is this, that whatever degree of barbarism or semi-civilization was attained by any of the early American races, it was everywhere based on similar ways of living; it never resembled feudal

ism, but came much nearer to communism; it was the condition of a people substantially free, whose labor was voluntary, and whose chiefs were of their own choosing. After a most laborious investigation, Bandelier-in the Twelfth Report of the Peabody Institute came to the conclusion that "the social organization and mode of government of the ancient Mexicans was a military democracy, originally based upon communism in living." And if this was apparently true even in the seemingly powerful and highly organized races of Mexico, it was certainly true of every North American tribe.

If we accept this conclusion-and most archæologists now accept it-much of what has been written about prehistoric American civilization proves to have been too hastily said. Tylor, for instance, after visiting the pyramid of Cholula, laid it down as an axiom: "Such buildings as these can only be raised under peculiar social conditions. The ruler must be a despotic sovereign, and the mass of the people slaves, whose subsistence and whose lives are sacrificed without scruple to execute the fancies of the monarch, who is not so much the governor as the unrestricted owner of the country and the people." He did not sufficiently consider that this is the first and easiest way to explain all great structures representing vast labor. A much-quoted American writer finds it necessary to explain even the works of the Mound-builders in a similar way. J. W. Foster thinks it clear that "the condition of society among the Mound-builders was not that of freemen, or, in other words, that the state possessed absolute power over the lives and fortunes of its subjects." But the theory of despotism is no more needed to explain a mound or a pueblo

than to justify the existence of the long houses of the Iroquois. Even the less civilized types of the aboriginal American race had learned how to unite in erecting their communal dwellings; and surely the higher the grade the greater the power.

The Mound-builders were formerly regarded as a