d a third of justice.

A remarkable institution, under King Nezahual-coyotl, was the "Council
of Music," intended to promote the study of science and the practise of
art.

Tezcuco, in fact, became the nursery not only of such sciences as could
be compassed by the scholarship of the period, but of various useful and
ornamental arts. "Its historians, orators, and poets were celebrated
throughout the country.... Its idiom, more polished than the Mexican,
continued long after the conquest to be that in which the best
productions of the native races were composed. Tezcuco was the Athens of
the Western World.... Among the most illustrious of her bards was their
king himself." A Spanish writer adds that it was to the eastern Aztecs
that noblemen sent their sons "to study poetry, moral philosophy, the
heathen theology, astronomy, medicine, and history."

[Illustration: Ancient Bridge near Tezcuco.]

The most remarkable problem connected with ancient Mexico is how to
reconcile the general refinement and civilization with the sacrifices of
human victims. There was no town or city but had its temples in public
places, with stairs visibly leading up to the sacrificial stone, ever
standing ready before some hideous idol or other--as already described.

In all countries there have been public spectacles of bloodshed, not
only as in the gladiators in the ancient circus--

butchered to make a Roman holiday,

or the tournays of the middle ages, but in the prize-ring fights and
public executions by ax or guillotine, of the age that is just passing
away. The thousands who perished for religious ideas by means of the
Holy Roman Inquisition should not be overlooked by the Spanish writers
who are so indignant that Montezuma and his priests sacrificed tens of
thousands under the claims of a heathen religion. The very day on which
we write these words, August 18th, is the anniversary of the last
sentence for beheading passed by our House of Lords. By that sentence
three Scottish "Jacobites" passed under the ax on Tower Hill, where
their remains still rest in a chapel hard by. So lately as 1873, the
Shah of Persia, when resident as a visitor in Buckingham Palace, was
amazed to find that the laws of Great Britain prevented him from
depriving five of his courtiers of their lives. They had just been found
guilty of some paltry infringement of Persian etiquette. During the last
generation or the previous one, both in England and Scotlan