122 THE ARCHAIC MAYA INSCRIPTIONS. 



It was mv fortune once to make a voyage with a veteran American man-of-warsman. 

 He had heen retired at the age of eighty-four, from a foreign station, and was going 

 home to see his mother. These facts alone should be sufficient to prove that he 

 belonged to the patriarchal strain whose contented and uneventful lives lap over the 

 confines of centuries — a transient type in the childhood of all nations, a permanent one 

 in nations whose whole existence is only a protracted childhood. But if further proof 

 were needed, it would be supplied by the additional facts that he had just acquired an 

 elementary knowledge of arithmetic, and sat all day long doing sums on a little slate. 

 His most gorgeous flights scarcely went beyond an exercise in two figures ; but the 

 exultation he exhibited at the results could not have been exceeded by that experienced 

 by Newton when he succeeded in calculating the laws of gravitation. In that ancient 

 mariner I behold the Maya race. The same simplicity of purpose, the same innocence 

 of higher culture, the same childish delight in practicing the single accomplishment 

 they had acquired, impelled them to work over and over the problems of their 

 chronology, as he worked over the simple sums of his arithmetic. 



But it may be insisted that the erection of these monuments and the carving of their 

 inscriptions involved some purpose apart from worship, education, catering to the 

 general need or the indulgence of childish proclivities. Certainly there was another 

 purpose, but the pursuit of it terminates in the same conclusion. Life was not all 

 play or utility with them more than with us. Then as now the great stream of 

 humanity had its multifarious phases, and flowed on in myriad-motived currents. But 

 the only feature of it left for us to consider is the relation existing between the 

 potentates and the people. From our knowledge of the state of affairs at the time of 

 the conquest, pieced out by history and tradition, we may be pretty confident that the 

 form of government covering the range of the inscriptions was pontifical. Pope and 

 king were one. All temporal and sacerdotal decrees were the offspring of his individual 

 will — or, more likely, of many wills, but obtaining validity only through his utterance. 

 The implied compact between sovereign and subject has never changed — is unalterable. 

 It is conditioned that there must be benefaction on the one part precedent to any 

 obligation of loyalty on the other. In these later days subject peoples drag on 

 uncomplainingly without receiving the nominated dole, but the Mayas, I fancy, were 

 more tenacious of their rights, and demanded the stipulated benefactions regularly — 

 or, at least, on every occasion of royal rejoicing ; and it seems to have been understood 

 that these largesses should be in the form of new chronological inscriptions. So it 

 may have come to pass that when a new pontiff was crowned, or an heir was born, or 

 a victory was gained, or any other event of signal importance occurred, the ruler 

 fulfilled his part of the compact by erecting a new temple, stela or altar and giving 

 the people a fresh installment of their beloved calendar ; and we see that the pressure 

 of public sentiment in the 9th cycle of the 54th great cycle forced the rulers to be 

 very lively about their work. 



