orth twenty
dollars! Cortez gives a view of "a large wall of dry stone, about nine
feet in height, which extends across the valley from one mountain to
the other: it was twenty feet in thickness, surmounted throughout its
whole extent by a breastwork a foot and a half thick, to enable them to
fight from the top of the wall." Diaz says, "We came to an enormous
intrenchment, built so strongly of stone, lime, and a kind of hard
bitumen, that it would only have been possible to break it down by
means of pick-axes."[21] Such a wall, or the vestiges of it, would last
for thousands of years; for it is not in the destructive power of man
wholly to obliterate it, and yet I have been utterly unable to find
even a ruin, and I verily believe the whole of this Chinese wall is a
fiction.

Tlascala is an Indian reservation of an oval shape, sixty-nine miles
long by forty-two miles wide. Its climate is cold. Its soil is not
remarkably good. It has had its independent government since the time
of Cortez. Its means of subsistence have been increased, and extensive
manufactories have been established. The only enumeration ever made of
its inhabitants was in 1793, when it was found to contain 51,177 souls.
In the extravagant official estimate of last year, its population is
set down at 80,171.[22] Cortez says that Tlascala contained a population
of 500,000 inhabitants, according to a report made by his orders. We
have here our historians within metes and bounds, between mountains and
stone walls; a perfect non-intercourse established with all the world;
all foreign means of supply cut off, and the Indians dependent for
subsistence upon their own rude cultivation of maize. My readers may
call me extravagant if I should say that Tlascala probably contained
about 10,000 inhabitants in the time of Cortez, and could therefore, in
an emergency, produce 1000 warriors. A greater number than this would
be contrary to the laws of population. I might here stop and call hard
names, but it is not my purpose to "bring a railing accusation" against
any. My only duty is to place evidence before the reader, and then let
him judge how much reliance is to be placed upon any historical
statements that have been trimmed and modified to suit the purposes of
the Spanish Inquisition.

The quick wit of Cortez early discovered that Tlascala was a great
natural fortress, and that he could make it the centre and base of his
operations in the wars he was contemplati