THE MEXICANS. 151 



they possess both the imitative and inventive faculties ; and although slow in their 

 motions, they shovr extraordinary perseverance in those w^orks that require long 

 continued attention. They are taciturn and severe in their manners, and seldom 

 exhibit those transitions of passion so common in other nations. They are generous 

 and disinterested, setting little value on gold, and giving, without reluctance, what 

 has cost them much labor to obtain. 



But it will still be asked, where are now the descendants of the civilised 

 Mexicans ? Where is the genius of that people ? A passage from Humboldt will 

 sufficiently answer these questions. "As to the moral faculties of the Indians, it 

 is difficult to appreciate them with justice, if we only consider this long oppressed 

 caste in their present state of degradation. The better sort of Indians, among 

 whom a certain degree of intellectual culture might be supposed, perished in great 

 part at the commencement of the Spanish conquest, the victims of European 

 ferocity. The Christian fanaticism broke out in a particular manner against the 

 Aztec priests ; and the Teopixqui, or ministers of the divinity, and all those who 

 inhabited the Teocalli, or houses of the gods, who might be considered as the 

 depositories of the historical, mythological and astronomical knowledge of the 

 country, were exterminated ; for the priests observed the meridian shade in the 

 gnomons, and regulated the calendar. The monks burned the hieroglyphic 

 paintings, by which every kind of knowledge was transmitted from generation to 

 generation. The people, deprived of these means of instruction, were plunged in 

 ignorance so much the deeper, inasmuch as the missionaries were unskilled in the 

 Mexican languages, and could substitute few new ideas in the place of the old. 

 The remaining natives then consisted of the most indigent race, poor cultivators, 

 artizans, among whom was a great number of weavers, porters, who were used as 

 beasts of burthen, and especially those dregs of the people, those crowds of beggars, 

 who bore witness to the imperfection of the social institutions, and the existence 

 of feudal oppression, and who, in the time of Cortez, filled the streets of all the 

 great cities in the Mexican empire. How shall we judge then, from these 

 miserable remains of a powerful people, of the degree of civilisation to which it 

 had risen from the twelfth to the sixteenth century, and of the . intellectual 

 development of which it is susceptible ? If all that remained of the French or 

 German nation were a few poor agriculturists, could we read in their features 

 that they belonged to nations which had produced Descartes and Clairaut, Kepler 

 and Leibnitz?"* 



* Polit. Essay, B. II, Chap. VI. 



