anction. Slavery existed in
several forms--captives of battles, reserved for the sacrifice;
criminals, paupers, and debtors became slaves voluntarily; and children
of poor parents who were sold into a species of mild servitude or
dependency. No child, however, could be born into the condition of
slavery--a somewhat unique proviso among systems of servitude.

The land system was, in some respects, similar to that which obtained
amongst the Incas: a just and philosophical distribution of the soil
amongst the people who dwelt upon it. Indeed, in the matter of land
tenure, both the Incas and the Aztecs--these semi-civilised peoples of
prehistoric America--employed a system which the most advanced nations
of to-day--Great Britain or the United States--have not yet evolved,
although in the case of Britain it seems that such is slowly appearing.
The system was that of parcelling out the land among the families of
the villages or country-side, and did not permit its absorption by
large, individual landholders. The peasant thus had his means of
support assured, and it was forbidden to dispose of the land thus
allotted, which reverted to the State in the case of extinction of the
family. This land system was governed by a careful code of laws, in
these American communities. In Peru the individual ownership of land
was a very marked feature of the social _regime_.[10] Lands were
nevertheless set apart for the sovereign.

[Footnote 10: See my books "Peru," and the "Andes and the Amazon."
These land systems are worthy of study by economists upon the land
question to-day.]

Taxes were paid upon agriculture and manufacture, in goods. These
included most of the very varied products of the empire--varying as
they did with the wide range of climate and topography, just as the
products of the Mexico of to-day vary. Gold and copper utensils,
pottery, arms, paper, cochineal, timber, cocoa, grains, fruits, gums,
animals, and birds, and the beautiful feather-work in which the people
excelled, were among these. Spacious warehouses in the capitals existed
(as in Peru) for the storing of these, and any embezzlement or
maladministration was rigorously punished.

Another institution of the Aztecs which calls to the traveller's mind a
similar one among the coeval Incas of Peru, three thousand miles away
in South America, was that of their means of communication. Such were
maintained by relays of runners or postmen, who journeyed at great
speed