MORGAN|] GENTES OR CLANS OF ANCIENT MEXICANS. 249 
language, was precisely what the Spaniards found in Mexico, and this was 
all they found. They had no occasion in their accounts to advance a step 
beyond this simple fact. A satisfactory explanation of this confederacy can 
be found in similar Indian confederacies. It was a growth from the com- 
mon institutions of the Indian family. Underneath these delusive pictures 
a council of chiefs is revealed, which was the natural and legitimate instru- 
ment of government under Indian institutions. No other form of government 
was possible among them. They had, beside, which was an equally legiti- 
mate part of this system, an elective and deposable war-chief (Teuchtli), 
the power to elect and to depose being held by a fixed constituency ever 
present, and ready to act when occasion required. The Aztec organization 
stood plainly before the Spaniards as a confederacy of Indian tribes. Noth- 
ing but the grossest perversion of obvious facts could have enabled Spanish 
writers to fabricate the Aztec monarchy out of a democratic organization. 
Without ascertaining the unit of their social system, if organized in 
gentes, as they probably were, and without gaining any knowledge of the 
organization that did exist, they boldly invented for the Aztecs a monarchy, 
with high feudal characteristics, out of the reception of Cortes by their 
principal war-chief, and such other flimsy materials as Montezuma’s dinner. 
This misconception has stood, through American indolence, quite as long 
as it deserves to stand. 
Since the foregoing was written, the investigations of Mr. Bandelier 
“On the Social Organization and Mode of Government of the Ancient 
Mexicans” have been published. With the new light thus thrown upon the 
subject, this chapter should have been re-written. He shows that the Aztees 
were composed of twenty gentes or clans. “The existence of twenty auton- 
omous consanguine groups is thus revealed, and we find them again at the 
time of the conquest, while their last vestiges were perpetuated until after 
1690, when Fray Augustin de Vetancurt mentions four chief quarters 
with their original Indian names, comprising and subdivided into twenty 
‘barrios’ Now the Spanish word ‘barrio’ is equivalent to the Mexican term 
‘calpulli’ Both indicate the kin, localized and settled with the view to per- 
1 
manence.”' This organization, as was to have been expected, lies at the 
1 Twelfth Annual Report of the Peabody Museum of Archrology and Ethnology, Cambridge, 
1880, p. 591, 
