938 HOUSES AND HOUSE-LIFE OF THE AMERICAN ABORIGINES. 
Status of barbarism. They had no money, but traded by barter of com- 
modities; very little personal property, and scarcely anything of value to 
Europeans. They were still a breech-cloth people, wearing this rag of 
barbarism as the unmistakable evidence of their condition; and the family 
was in the syndyasmian or pairing form, with separation at any moment at 
the option of either party. It was the weakness of the family, its inability 
to face alone the struggle of life, which led to the construction of joint- 
tenement houses throughout North and South America by the Indian tribes; 
and it was the gentile organization which led them to fill these houses, on 
the principle of kin, with related families. 
In a pueblo as large as that of Mexico, which was the largest found in 
America, and may possibly have contained thirty thousand inhabitants, 
there must have been a number of large communal houses of different 
sizes, from those that were called palaces, because of their size, to those 
filled by a few families. Degrees of prosperity are shown in barbarous as 
well as in civilized life in the quarters of the people. Herrera states that 
the houses of the poorer sort of people were ‘‘small, low, and mean,” but 
that, ‘as small as the houses were, they commonly contained two, four, and 
"1 Wherever a household is found in Indian life, be the mar- 
six families. 
ried pairs composing it few or many, that household practiced communism 
in living. In the largest of these houses it would not follow necessarily 
that all its inmates lived from common stores, because they might form 
several household groups in the same house; but in the large household of 
which Montezuma was a member, it is plain that it was fed from common 
stores prepared in a common cook-house, and divided from the kettle in 
earthen bowls, each containing the dinner of a single person. Montezuma 
was supposed to be absolute master of Mexico, and what they saw at this 
dinner was interpreted with exclusive reference to him as the central figure. 
The result is remarkably grotesque. It was their own self-deception, with- 
out any assistance from the Aztecs. The accounts given by Diaz and 
Cortes, and which subsequent writers have built upon with glowing enthu- 
siasm and free additions, is ‘simply the gossip of a camp of soldiers sud- 
denly cast into an earlier form of society, which the Village Indians of 
1 History of America, ii, 360, 
