MORGAN.) THE AZTEC DINNER. 937 
life, and more particularly of the dinner, which will now be considered. — It 
is worth the attempt to take up the pictures of these and succeeding 
authors, and see whether the real truth of the matter cannot be elicited 
from their own statements. There was undoubtedly a basis of facts under- 
neath them, because without such a basis the superstructure could not have 
been created. 
It may with reason be supposed that the Spaniards found Montezuma, 
with his gentile kindred, in a large joint-tenement house, containing perhaps 
fifty or a hundred families united ina communal household The dinner they 
witnessed was the single daily meal of this household, prepared in a com: 
mon cook-house from common stores, and divided at the kettle. The din- 
ner of each person was placed in an earthern bowl, with which in his hand 
an Indian needed neither chair nor table, and, moreover, had neither the 
one nor the other. The men ate first, and by themselves, Indian fashion ; 
and the women, of whom only a few were seen, afterwards and by them- 
selves. On this hypothesis the dinner in question is susceptible of a satis- 
factory explanation 
It has been shown that each Aztec community of persons owned lands 
in common, from which they derived their support. Their mode of tillage 
and of distribution of the products, whatever it may have been, would 
have returned to each family or household, large or small, its rightful share. 
Communism in living in large households composed of related families 
springs naturally from such a soil. It may be considered a law of their 
condition, and, plainly enough, the most economical mode of life they 
could adopt until the idea of property had been sufficiently developed in 
their minds to lead to the division of lands among individuals with owner- 
ship in fee, and power of alienation. Their social system, which tended to 
anite kindred families in a common household, their ownership of lands in 
common, and their ownership, as a group, of a joint-tenement house, which 
would necessarily follow, would not admit a right in persons to sell, and 
thus to introduce strangers into the ownership of such lands or such houses. . 
Lands and houses were owned and held under a common system which 
entered into their plan of life. The idea of property was forming in their 
minds, but it was still in that immature state which pertains to the Middle 
