Casas, who called all the
historians of the Conquest of Mexico liars; and though his labored
refutation of their fictions has disappeared, yet, fortunately, the
natural evidences of their untruth still remain. Having before me the
surveys and the levels of our own engineers, I have presumed to doubt
that water ever ran up hill, that navigable canals were ever fed by
"back water," that pyramids (_teocalli_) could rest on a foundation of
soft earth, that a canal twelve feet broad by twelve feet deep, mostly
below the water level, was ever dug by Indians with their rude
implements, that gardens ever floated in mud, or that brigantines ever
sailed in a salt marsh, or even that 100,000 men ever entered the
mud-built city of Mexico by a narrow causeway in the morning, and after
fighting all day returned by the same path at night to their camp, or
that so large a besieging army as 150,000 men could be supported in a
salt-marsh valley, surrounded by high mountains.

In answer to the question why such fables have so long passed for
history, I have the ready answer, that the Inquisition controlled every
printing-office in Spain and her colonies, and its censors took good
care that nothing should be printed against the fair fame of so good a
Christian as Cortez, who had painted upon his banner an image of the
Immaculate Virgin, and had bestowed upon her a large portion of his
robbery; who had gratified the national taste for holy wars by writing
one of the finest of Spanish romances of history; who had induced the
Emperor to overlook his crime of levying war without a royal license by
the bestowal of rich presents and rich provinces; so that, by the favor
of the Emperor and the favor of the Inquisition, a _filibustero_,
whose atrocities surpassed those of every other on record, has come
down to us as a Christian hero.

The innumerable little things about their Indian mounds force the
conviction on the experienced eye of an American traveler that the
Aztecs were a horde of North American savages, who had precipitated
themselves first upon the table-land, and afterward, like the Goths
from the table-lands of Spain, extended their conquests over the
expiring civilization of the coast country; and this idea is confirmed
by the fact that the magnificent Toltec monuments of a remote
antiquity, discovered in the tropical forests, were apparently unknown
to the Aztecs. The conquest of Mexico, like our conquest of California,
was in itse