POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS PRELIMINARY. 7 



five hundred persons annually, in Mexico and adjacent towns alone, 

 and of a far greater number throughout the country at large. Simi- 

 larly, in the populous Central American states, sufficiently civilized 

 to have a developed system of calculation, a regular calendar, books, 

 maps, etc., there were like extensive sacrifices of prisoners, slaves, chil- 

 dren, whose hearts were torn out and offered palpitating on altars, and 

 who, in other cases, were flayed alive and their skins used as dancing- 

 dresses by the priests. 



Nor need we seek in remote regions or among alien races for 

 proofs that there does not exist a necessary connection between the 

 social types classed as civilized and those higher sentiments which 

 we commonly associate with civilization. The mutilations of prisoners 

 exhibited on Assyrian sculptures are not surpassed in cruelty by any 

 we find among the most bloodthirsty of wild races ; and Rameses II, 

 who delighted in having himself sculptured on temple-walls through- 

 out Egypt as holding a dozen captives by the hair, and striking off 

 their heads at a blow, slaughtered during his conquests more human 

 beings than a thousand chiefs of savage tribes put together. The 

 tortures inflicted on captured enemies by red Indians are not greater 

 than were those inflicted of old on felons by crucifixion, or on sus- 

 pected rebels by sewing them up in the hides of slaughtered animals, 

 or on heretics by smearing them over with combustibles and setting 

 fire to them. The Damaras, described as so utterly heartless that 

 they laugh on seeing one of their number killed by a wild beast, 

 are not worse than were the Romans, who made such elaborate pro- 

 visions for gratifying themselves by watching wholesale slaughters in 

 their arenas. If the numbers destroyed by the hordes of Attila were 

 not equaled by the numbers which the Roman armies destroyed at the 

 conquest of Selucia, and by the numbers of the Jews massacred under 

 Hadrian, it was simply because the occasions did not permit. The 

 cruelties of Nero, Gallienus, and the rest may compare with those of 

 Genghis and Timour ; and, when we read of Caracalla that, after he had 

 murdered twenty thousand friends of his murdered brother, his sol- 

 diers forced the Senate to place him among the gods, we are shown 

 that in the Roman people there was a ferocity not less than that which 

 deifies the most sanguinaiy chiefs among the worst of savages. Nor . 

 did Christianity greatly change matters. Throughout media3val Eu- 

 rope political offenses and religious dissent brought on men carefully 

 devised agonies equaling if not exceeding any inflicted by the most 

 brutal of barbarians. 



Startling as the truth seems, it is yet a truth to be recognized, that 

 increase of humanity does not go on ^:)ri 2^ttssu with civilization ; but 

 that, contrariwise, the earlier stages of civilization necessitate a rela- 

 tive inhumanity. Among tribes of primitive men, it is the more brutal 

 rather than the more kindly who succeed in those conquests which 

 effect the earliest social consolidations ; and, through many subsequent 



