August 29, 1918 
LAND 6? WATER 
13 
their lands torn from them by greedy strangers, their bodies 
enslaved to their conquerors. Hardly a voice was raised in 
protest. The Aztec race sank into the silence, leaving little 
behind them save the memory of their wrbngs. And that a 
memory which is onlv preserved in the records of the men 
by whom the wrongs were committed, and which has now 
become a mere ghost. 
At the same time, it is impossible to withhold one's admira- 
tion from the Spaniards, especially from Cortes. They were 
a tough lot, indomitable, pertinacious, and with the courage 
of lions. At no time during the conquest were more than 
seven or eight hundred actually engaged, and it was only 
by reviving old feuds among the Aztecs and playing off one 
party against another that the trick was done which added 
a new world to the dominions of Spain. Cortes, who may be 
taken as a type of them all, was unquestionably a mightv 
man, and I wonder he never focussed the attention 
of Carlyle. He ranks head and shoulders above that 
sordid bandit Frederick the Great. With a very little 
change — and yet a little that counts for much — one could 
speak of Cortes as one of the greatest men of historv. 
His deeds may be read in two lights, as deeds of violence 
or as deeds of religion. Had it not been for his bull-neck 
the deeds would ne\'er have been done ; had it not been for 
his. mystic face, thev would have been merely brutal and 
abominable. As it is, they present that most bewildering 
and mysterious spectacle of actions which spring at once 
frojn the highest and lowest motives of human nature. Of 
course, we have to read these things in the light of history, 
considering the times in which Cortes lived, the ideals then 
prevalent, and so on. But, even so, it is a queer puzzle. 
In all ages of the world such men are "a portent and an 
astonishment." 
The Aztec civilisation was neither the first nor the last 
to be wiped out by another not superior to itself ; for I 
cannot persuade myself, on a broad view of the facts, that 
the Spaniards had any claim to stand on a higher level than 
their victims. In many instances, notably in that of Greece, 
the spiritual essentials of the destroyed civilisation have 
survived the overthrow of its outward form, escaping like a 
liberated soul from the ruined bodv. But how different 
the history of the world would have been if Greece had been 
wiped out in the nascent stage of her culture ! Such was 
the fate of the Aztecs. Their civilisation was nipped in the 
bud: a wind passed over it, and it was gone — body and 
soul. I cannot but believe that they had it in them to do 
great things. But thef were never given a chance. How 
fortunate it is for our theones of "progress" that murdered 
civilisations, like murdered men, tell no tales ! If only we 
could have a History of Lost Causes written by the losers ! 
But it is the winner who tells the story, and he tells it to suit 
himself. There is a flaw in the history of the world at this 
point. 
The reader who cares for historical parallels will find 
much in this narrative of plunder, butchery, and oppression 
to remind him of the Germans in our own day. And the 
pariillel becomes still closer when we pass from the Conquest 
of Mexico to the Conquest of Peru, which followed a few years 
later. In the career of Cortes there is a redeeming tinge of 
romance and knighterrantry. But there was none of this in 
Pizarro, the Conqueror of Peru, as there is none in the Germans. 
Pizarro was an imitator of Cortes, as the Kaiser is an imitator 
of Napoleon, and in both cases the imitation has all the vices 
of a bad copy. Pizarro wa$ an apostle of schreckligkeit 
pursued to its logical conclusion, a sordid, perfidious ruffian, 
whom his own age, which was cruel enough, could not refrain 
from detesting. Nothing meaner or more brutal is recorded 
of man than his treatment of the Peruvian Inca. The 
Spaniards in Peru and the Germans in Belgium may be 
justly classed together as brothers in arms — for the same 
cause and with the same motives. The cause is plunder 
and the motives are greed. Even the religion — for there is 
something that calls itself by that name in both cases — is one, 
with a difference in the ritual and the phraseology. 
Such is conquest, whether the scene be laid in Mexico or 
Belgium, in Lima or in Brest-Litovsk, in the sixteenth cen- 
tury or the twentieth. We do well to study it in forms such 
as these, where its nature stands forth naked and unashamed. 
In other forms, and with motives either similar or different, 
conquest has been going on for untold ages and in every 
qu irter of the globe. It has provided, not indeed the whole 
body of human history, but the framework or 3keleton on 
which the body has been built up. It has absorbed more 
human energy than any other pursuit or interest of man- 
kind.. Its results are engrained in the characters, traditions, 
aims, ambitions, and ideals of all nations, and even of all 
individuals, none excepted. We are all the children of 
conquerors : their blood flows in the veins of every man — 
yes, and of every woman. There is no slave and no pacifist 
the wide world over but counts a conqueror among his 
ancestors. All day long we use, breathe, eat, drink, and 
enjoy the fruj^ts of conquest — or lament that we have been 
deprived of them. 
And now there is to be a League of Peace, and conquest is 
to be no more. I do not say that this is impossible. Nothing 
within reason is impossible to man. N'or do I hold a brief 
for conquest or proclaim it necessar\' to^ the evolution of the 
race. Let it be judged by its fniits — which is the world 
as we see it to-day, a somewhat mixed affair ! But I do 
say that its elimination from the business of th'e nations will 
prove a difficult undertaking. Conquest is not the name for 
HERNANDO CORTES . 
Conqueror ol Mexico 
an occasional debauch in the life of great States. It is the' 
name of a permanent habit ; of a master-current in human 
history ; of a radical, fundamental, all-pervasive thing. 
What is involved in curing the world of this habit of con- 
quest may be faintly imagined by thinking of men who are 
required to give up the habits of a lifetime at a moment's 
notice — as if all the confirmed drunkards of the world were 
to 'meet in congress and bind themselves by a common resolu- 
tion to forswear the bottle for ever. I do not press the 
comparison, but it is enough to suggest what I have in mind. 
By ceasing to conquer, the nations would not become less 
than conquerors, but more. For they would have to begin 
by conquering themselves, by turning their backs on that 
which has made them what they are, by cutting a breach 
wide and deep between their past and their future. They 
will not succeed in an undertaking of this magnitude unless 
they realise from the outset how big and how difficult it is. 
I doubt if our idealists have sufficiently considered the matter 
from this point of view. They are so intent upon the future 
that they seem to have forgotten the past, especially that 
part of the past which lives on in themselves. 
To them I would venture to make the suggestion that they 
should read this old book again ; not because I suppose them 
to be deeply interested in Mexico, but because the conquest 
of that unhappy country will give them a characteristic 
sample of the force, or vice, or habit, or tendency in nations 
and men — call it which you will — whose action they now 
propose to arrest. They will learn incidentally how the 
New World became the property of the Old. And this will 
prove the more instructive in view of the fact that the New 
World, having paid off its conquerors in their own coin, is 
now foremost in demanding that conquest shall be no more. 
