THEFT INTEMPERANCE MARRIAGE SLAVERY WAR. 105 



subordinate officers, who performed the duty of police officers or 

 spies over the families that were assigned to their vigilance. 

 Records were kept in these courts of the decisions of the judges ; 

 and the laws of the realm were likewise perpetuated and made 

 certain, in the same hieroglyphic or picture writing. " The 

 great crimes against society," says Prescott, "were all made 

 capital ; — even the murder of a slave was punished with death. 

 Adulterers, as among the Jews, were stoned to death. Thieving, 

 according to the degree of the offence, was punished with slavery 

 or death. It was a capital offence to remove the boundaries of 

 another's lands ; to alter the established measures ; and for a guar- 

 dian not to be able to give a good account of his ward's property. 

 Prodigals who squandered their patrimony were punished in like 

 manner. Intemperance was visited with the severest penalties, 

 as if they had foreseen in it the consuming canker of their own as 

 well as of the other Indian races in later times. It was punished 

 in the young with death, and in older persons with loss of rank 

 and confiscation of property. 



" The rites of marriage were celebrated with as much formality 

 as in any christian country; and the institution was held in such 

 reverence, that a tribunal was established for the sole purpose of 

 determining questions in regard to it. Divorces could not be 

 obtained, until authorized by a sentence of this court after a patient 

 hearing of the parties. " 1 



Slavery seems to have always prevailed in Mexico. The cap- 

 tives taken in war were devoted to the gods under the sacrificial 

 knife ; but criminals, public debtors, extreme paupers, persons who 

 willingly resigned their freedom, and children who were sold by 

 their parents, — were allowed to be held in bondage and to be 

 transferred from hand to hand, but only in cases in which their 

 masters were compelled by poverty to part with them. 



A nation over which the god of war presided and whose king 

 was selected, mainly, for his abilities as a chieftain, naturally 

 guarded and surrounded itself with a well devised military system. 

 Religion and war were blended in the imperial ritual. Monte- 

 zuma, himself had been a priest before he ascended the throne. 

 This dogma of the Aztec policy, originated, perhaps, in the 

 necessity of keeping up a constant military spirit among a people 

 whose instincts were probably civilized, but whose geographical 

 position exposed them, in the beginning, to the attacks of unquiet 

 and annoying tribes. The captives were sacrificed to the bloody 



Prescott, vol. 1, p. 35. 



