120 MEXICO. 
ever, is its name, and such the opinion of most persons in Mexico ; and, 
although I should not perhaps, in justice, venture to express an opinion, 
yet I cannot help believing with the majority. 
When we look at the sculpture at the sides, we are struck with the fit- 
ness of the adornment for sacrificial ceremonies. The Mexicans un- 
doubtedly sacrificed the captives they had taken in battle, and the bas-relief 
evidently represents a conqueror and a captive. The victor's hand is 
raised in the act of tearing the plumes from his prisoner's crest, while the 
captive bows beneath the indignity, and prostrates his arms : — and here let 
me invite the reader's attention to the great similarity of these figures and 
.heir dresses, to those delineated by Catherwood and Stephens, as having 
been found in Yucatan and at Palenque.* 
I will now give you some account of the Mexican Sacrifices. These 
were of two kinds : the common sacrifice of human victims, and the 
" Gladiatorial Sacrifice." 
It is supposed, that neither the Toltecs nor Chechemicas permitted hu- 
man sacrifices, and that it was reserved for the successors of these occu- 
pants of the Vale of Anahuac to institute the abominable practice. The 
history of the Aztec tribe reveals to us the fact, that it fought itself gradu- 
ally to power. The Mexicans founded their Empire first among the la- 
gunes and marshes of the lake ; and it grew, by slow degrees, to the 
power and wealth it possessed at the period of the conquest. 
When I encounter in Mexican history a monstrous fact like this, of the 
sacrifice to the gods of the unfortunate prisoners who had fallen into 
their power in battle, I am not deterred, by its enormity, from inquiring 
whether some secret policy may not have originated the horrid rite. The 
mind naturally revolts at the idea that it sprang from a mere brutal love 
of blood, or that a nation could, at any period of the world, have been so 
cruel and so inhuman ! 
In reviewing, then, the history of the Empire of a weak but bold and 
ambitious people — fighting for a foothold ; becoming powerful only as it 
was able to inspire its enemies with terror ; unable to maintain, subdue, 
or imprison its captives — we may ask ourselves, whether it was not rather 
a stroke of savage statesmanship in the Chiefs of the time, to make a merit 
of necessity, and a holy and religious rite of what, under other circum- 
stances and in a later period of the world, has been considered a murder 1 
And such, I believe, to have been the beginning of the Mexican sacri- 
fices. A weak people unable to. control, enslave, or trust its prisoners, 
devoted them to the gods. But, in the progress of time, when that nation 
had acquired a strength equal to any emergency, this ceremony, too, Ixad 
become a prescriptive usage — a traditionary and most important part of 
the religion itself; and thus, what in its inception was the policy of fee- 
* Vide Stephens's Yucatan, vo). i, pp. 412 and 413, and the platea opposite tliem. 
