2926 HOUSES AND HOUSE-LIFE OF THE AMERICAN ABORIGINES. 
. 
It may be premised that there is a strong probability, from what is 
known of Indian life and society, that the house in which Montezuma lived 
was a joint-tenement house of the aboriginal American model, owned by a 
large number of related families, and occupied by them in common as joint 
proprietors; that the dinner in question was the usual single daily meal of 
a communal household, prepared in a common cook-house from common 
stores, and divided, Indian fashion, from the kettle; and that all the Span- 
iards found in Mexico was a simple confederacy of three Indian tribes, the 
counterpart of which was found in all parts of America. 
It may be premised further that the Spanish adventures who thronged 
to the New World after its discovery found the same race of Red Indians 
in the West India Islands, in Central and South America, in Florida, and 
in Mexico.’ In their mode of life and means of subsistence, in their weap- 
ons, arts, usages, and customs, in their institutions, and in their mental and 
physical characteristics, they were the same people in different stages of 
advancement. No distinction of race was observed, and none in fact 
existed. They were broken up into numerous independent. tribes, each 
under the government of a council of chiefs. Among the more advanced 
tribes, confederacies existed, which represented the highest stage their gov- 
ernmental institutions had attained. In some of them, as in the Aztec con- 
federacy, they had a principal war-chief, elected for life or during good 
behavior, who was the general commander of the military bands. His 
powers were those of a general, and necessarily arbitrary when in the field. 
Behind this war-chief—noticed, it is true, by Spanish writers, but without 
explaining or even ascertaining its functions—was the council of chiefs, 
“the great council without whose authority,” Acosta remarks, Montezuma 
“might not do anything of importance.”*? The civil and military powers 
of the government were in a certain sense co-ordinated between the council 
of chiefs and the military commander. The government of the Aztec con- 
federacy was essentially democratic, because its organization and institu- 
‘But among all the other inhabitants of America there 1s such a striking similitude in the form 
of their bodies, and the qualities of their minds, that notwithstanding the diversities occasioned by the 
influence of climate, or unequal progress in improvement, we must pronounce them to be descended 
from one source.”—Robertson’s History of America, Law’s ed., p. 69. 
*The Natural and Moral History of the East and West Indies, Lond. ed., 1604, Grimstone’s 
Trans., p. 485. 
