LAND &? WATER 
August 29, 1918- 
An Old Book Read Again : By L. P. Jacks 
WHEN I was a boy at school I was given, as a 
prize for " proficiency " in something or another, 
a calf-bound copy of Prcscott's History of the 
Conquest of Mexico. In those days my interest 
in the New World hardly extended beyond the 
fact that it was the abode of the Red Indian ; and 1 remember 
to this hour my indignation and disgust on discovering that 
this book of "history" had been assigned me as a holiday 
task. However, I read it — or "did" it, as we used to say^ — 
and duly wrote the "essay" upon it expected by my pre- 
ceptors at the termination of the holidays. 
Needless to say, I conceived a hatred towards the 
book which has lirgered with me into riper years, and in 
consequence of which I have never opened it. since, until 
the other day. Yet, somehow, that calf-bound volume has 
clung to me tenaciously ; has followed me about in my 
wanderings through life ; has been packed and unpacked 
in I know not how many changes of residence ; and has 
always managed to occupy a prominent place in my library. 
I have lost many of my books ; many hav'e been borrowed 
and never returned ; I have been somewhat careless in 
looking after them ;. but this book has remained immune 
alike from my own carelessness and from the dishonesty of 
my friends. Often I have had difficulty in finding other 
books I wanted to read ; but this one, which I never wanted 
to read, has always been tlie first to stare me in the face 
whenever I went to my library shelves. That circumstance, 
1 think, has deepened my hatred of it. Perhaps the reader 
has a book which has played him the same trick and become 
the object of the same emotions. 
It is probable that my aversion to the History of the Conquest 
of Mexico would never have been overcome had it not been 
for the salutary influence of the Great War. It came about 
in this way. The war had set me thinking — as it has set 
many people thinking— about "conquest" in general, and 
about some conquests in particular. I had been ponderirg 
the part which conquest has played in building up all the 
great nations of the world — my own included. I had been 
reflecting on the way in which habits of conquest and tradi- 
tions of conquest had become embedded in the structure of 
these great States and in the character of the peoples who 
inhabit them ; and especially I had been wondering what 
the little nations would say if the great ones, which have 
conquered so much, were to forbid them to conquer- any- 
thing. Then, too, I had been trying to reckon up some of 
the benefits that I enjoyed from day to day as a legacy from 
the conquering deeds of the British race ; of how, for example, 
the very sugar 1 put in my coffee — or used to put — owed 
something of its presence on my table to the buccaneers of 
Central America and to the old raiders on the Spanish main. 
Insensibly my thoughts were drawn nearer and nearer 
to the equator ; until, chancing one day to look up 
from my library chair, the' word "Mexico," printed in 
tarnished gilt on the back of the calf-bound volume, 
suddenly caught my eye. "After all," I said to myself, 
"that book may be worth reading again. In Mexico, 
per se, I am not much interested. But the conquest 
of Mexico is another matter. From the little I remember 
of the book, it was a very thorough-going, genuine, out-and-- 
out kind of conquest^ — a conquest that did not pretend to 
be anything but a conquest — as due, for example, to a fit 
of absence of mind. Here, then, I may find the typical 
article undiluted by the after-thoughts of historians. More- 
over, the book may help me to understand how the New 
World first became the property of the Old World — an 
interesting question in view of the American pronouncements 
in favour of a League of Peace, which is to put a stop to 
conquest in the future proceedings of the great States. The 
Conquest of Mexico was, if I remember righth', the first step 
in the process." And with that thought there suddenly 
rose before my mind a distinct vision of 'the portrait of 
Hernando Cortes, the conqueror of Mexico, prefixed to my 
old volume, which I had not opened for more than a genera- 
tion : a man with the neck of a bull and the face of a mystic. 
1 had the book down in a twinkling. And that night 1 did 
not go to bed. 
It is a terrible story. The author says it is an epic, and 
from the literary point of view that, 1 dare say, is the proper 
name. But in the human sense it is a tragedy- — one of the 
greatest and the most inexplicable. I am not ashamed to 
confess that I wept over it a dozen times and gnashed my 
teeth almost as often. Prescott's sympathies are with the 
Spaniards ; mine are with the Aztecs. Here was a flourishing 
civilisation, not yet developed, it is true, but full of promise. 
In fewer centuries that most civilised races have taken to 
advance as far, the Aztecs had risen from savagery and 
chaos into an orderly, happy, progressive human society. 
They were lovers of beauty and they were lovers of order. 
They had their literature, their science, their arts. They 
were skilled agriculturists and notable builders. They had 
a religion which philosophers to this day find not unworthy 
of study, and which seems to have provided them with 
what they needed in that kind. True, there were human 
sacrifices: "bloody" enough, no doubt, but not "bloodier" 
than those per- 
petrated by the 
Spanish Inquisition, 
then in full swing. 
Their king or em- 
peror was Monte- 
zuma, who, as I 
read the narrative, 
seems to have been 
far more of a 
Christian gentle- 
man than the bull- 
necked mystic who 
did him to death. 
He was a gentle,, 
forgiving, liberal- 
handed soul ; utter- 
ly incapable of 
understanding the 
gold-hunting, cross- 
bearing, rapacious 
buccaneers who had 
so suddenly and 
strangely dropped 
from the skies into 
the midst of his 
smiling realms. If 
they asked for a 
he found that they 
full. Nothing could 
MONTEZUMA 
King ol the Aztecs 
thing, he gave it them. When 
wanted gold, he sent it in baskets 
excel his politeness to Cortes, nor his hospitality, nor 
his general good manners. Under the severest trials he was 
never untrue to his word ; never undignified, violent, or 
spiteful. Moreover, he seems to have had a capacity for 
loving his enemies, for a parallel to which I look in vain 
among the records of Christian monarchy. He conceived a 
sort of dog-like affection for Cortes which no cruelty, no 
perfidy could impair. Prescott leaves the impression that 
he was weak and vacillating in his dealings with the Spaniards. 
The truth is that he could not make them out and had not 
■the remotest notion how to handle them. He had shown 
himself. strong enough in dealing with his own people and 
his own conditions, for he had united all Mexico under his 
prosperous and enlightened rule. He had done for Mexico 
what Ferdinand and Isabella had done for Spain, and I see 
no reason to doubt that if things had been allowed to take 
their course, Mexican civilisation would have advanced 
rapidly to yet higher levels. It was only when this unknown 
element was launched into his life, and he was suddenly 
called to cope with a sort of human nature that lay beyond 
his ken, that he lost his bearings and suffered himself to 
become the sport of circumstances. The minds of these 
Spaniards, their motives, and their characters were as- 
impenetrable to his understanding as their bodies, clothed 
in armour of proof, were impenetrable to the arrows of his- 
troops. I do not believe that Montezuma was a weak man. 
But I am sure he was a gentleman. He offered the Spaniards 
courteous speech, hospitable actions, generous gifts. They 
waved the cross in his face ard answered liim with firebrands, 
musket balls, and Toledo steel. * 
It wrings the heart to read of this good man and his people, 
deserted by the Heavens, and with none on earth to champion 
their cause or to avenge their wrongs. Of course, their own 
gods left them in the lurch, though one of them, at all events, 
seems to have been quite a respectable deity, even if judged by 
modern standards of what a god ought to be. But — and 
this is perhaps a little more surprising — other people's gods 
seem to have, been equally indifferent to their fate. It was 
unquestionably a cruel fate, and, so far as I can see, 
undeserved. In five years their empire was shattered to 
pieces, their chief cities burnt to the ground, their religion 
overthrown, their arts and literature scattered to the winds. 
