pulace enjoying the spectacle the victims
were enemies of the king or criminals deserving execution.

Perhaps it is a more difficult problem to explain how so civilized a
community as the Aztec races undoubtedly were could look with
complacency upon any one tasting a dish composed of some part of the
captive he had taken in battle. It is not only repulsive as an idea, but
seems impossible. Yet much depends on the point of view as well as the
atmosphere. According to archeologists, all the primeval races of men
could at a pinch feed on human flesh, but after many generations learned
to do better without it. We may have simply outgrown the craving, till
at last we call it unnatural, whereas those ancient Mexicans, with all
their wealth of food, had refined upon it. Let us again refer to the Old
Testament:

Thou hast taken thy sons and thy daughters and these hast thou
sacrificed to be devoured (Ezek. xvi, 20).

... have caused their sons to pass for them through the fire, to
devour them (Ezek. xxiii, 37).

We may therefore infer that to the early races of Canaan (including
Israel), as well as to the primeval Aztecs, it was a privilege and
religious custom to eat part of any sacrifice that had been offered.

There can be little doubt, to any one who has studied the earliest human
antiquities, that all races indulged in cannibalism, not only during
that enormously remote age called Paleolithic, but in comparatively
recent though still prehistoric times. "This is clearly proved by the
number of human bones, chiefly of women and young persons, which have
been found charred by fire and split open for extraction of the marrow."
Such charred bones have frequently been preserved in caves, as at
Chaleux in Belgium, where in some instances they occurred "in such
numbers as to indicate that they had been the scene of cannibal feasts."

The survival of human sacrifice among the Aztecs, with its accompanying
traces of cannibalism, was due to the savagery of a long previous
condition of their Indian race; just as in the Greek drama, when that
ancient people had attained a high level of culture and refinement, the
sacrifice of a human life, sometimes a princess or other distinguished
heroine, was not unfrequent. We remember Polyxena, the virgin daughter
of Hecuba, whom her own people resolved to sacrifice on the tomb of
Achilles; and her touching bravery, as she requests the Greeks not to
bind her, being ashame