MORGAN,] HOW SPANISH HISTORIES SHOULD BE REGARDED. Dou 
tions were so. If a more special designation is needed, it will be sufficient 
to describe it as a military democracy. 
The Spaniards who overran Mexico and Peru gave a very different 
interpretation of these two organizations. Having found, as they supposed, 
two absolute monarchies with feudal characteristics, the history of American 
Indian institutions was cast in this mold. The chief attention of Huropeans 
in the sixteenth century was directed to these two governments, to which 
the affairs of the numerous remaining tribes and confederacies were made 
subordinate. Subsequent history has run in the same grooves for more 
than three centuries, striving diligently to confirm that of which confirma- 
tion was impossible. The generalization was perhaps proper enough, that 
if the institutions of the Aztecs and Peruvians, such well-advanced Indian 
tribes, culminated in monarchy, those of the Indian tribes generally were 
essentially monarchical, and therefore those of Mexico and Peru should 
represent the institutions of the Red Race. 
It may be premised, finally, that the histories of Spanish America may 
be trusted in whatever relates to the acts of the Spaniards, and to the acts 
and personal characteristics of the Indians; in whatever relates to their 
weapons, implements, and utensils, fabrics, food, and raiment, and things 
of a similar character. But in whatever relates to Indian society and gov- 
ernment, their social relations and plan of life, they are nearly worthless, 
because they learned nothing and knew nothing of either. ‘We are at full 
liberty to reject them in these respects, and commence anew; using any 
facts they may contain which harmonize with what is known of Indian 
society. It was a calamity to the entire Red Race that the achievements 
of the Village Indians of Mexico and Central America, in the development 
of their institutions, should have suffered a shipwreck so nearly total. The 
only remedy for the evil done them is to recover, if possible, a knowledge 
of their institutions, which alone can place them in their proper position in 
the history of mankind. 
In order to understand so simple an event in Indian life as Montezu- 
ma’s dinner, it is necessary to know certain usages and customs, and even 
certain institutions of the Indian tribes generally, which had a direct bear- 
ing upon the dinner of every Indian in America at the epoch of the Spanish 
