in his dealings with Montezuma and others, but the man of
his age regarded very lightly the obligation of his word toward a
savage. Indeed, it was a well-known principle that no faith was
necessarily to be kept with either heretics or heathen and no oath was
binding against the interests of the state. Cortes, of course, had all
the contempt for the Aztecs that Caucasians usually have for inferior
races, although in his letters, he tried his very best to be fair, to
be just, even to be generous to these {134} people he overcame; and no
one can doubt the sincerity with which he desired to promote the
spreading of the Christian religion.

They did things differently in those days. Not only did they believe
that the religion of the heathen should be changed by force, but they
believed that in some way they could constrain all people to accept
Christianity. More blood has been shed in promoting the idea that the
outsider should be compelled to come into the fold than from the
misinterpretation of any other text in the sacred scriptures. If any
civilized power in the world to-day should send an expeditionary force
into a heathen country, which should signalize its arrival therein by
the desecration of its temples and the destruction of its idols, the
commander would be recalled at once. We have learned other methods,
methods of persuasion, of reason, of love. The age of Cortes knew
nothing of these methods, and he was only following out the common
practice when he smashed with his battle-axe the hideous gods of the
Mexicans, and washed and purified with clean water, the reeking, gory,
ill-smelling slaughter-houses which were the Aztec Holy of Holies, and
adorned them with crosses and images of the Blessed Virgin Mary. When
Charles the IX. offered Henry of Navarre a choice of death, mass, or
the Bastille on the night of Saint Bartholomew, he gave him one more
chance than the early steel-clad militant missionary gave to the
aborigines of the new world--for them there was no Bastille.

Making friends with the Tabascans, and leaving one hundred and fifty
men to guard his base of supplies at Vera Cruz and to watch the coast,
Cortes began his march toward Mexico on the sixteenth day of August,
1519. He proceeded with the greatest caution. Bernal {135} Diaz, an
old soldier, who afterward wrote a most vivid and graphic account of
the conquest, of which he was no small part, says that they marched
forward "with their beards