ction is not easily eradicated that the remnant of
a once powerful tribe of Indians, partially emerged from barbarism,
here received their death, in cold blood, at the hands of a party of
white murderers. The good Archbishop Loranzana commends the piety of
Cortez in never neglecting to attend mass before going out to his daily
work of slaughter. It was a pious act, no doubt, that on the last
morning of the siege he stopped and listened to a mass--that pantomime
which set forth the death of the Redeemer of the world--preparatory to
consummating the butchery of Indians incapable of resistance.

Garci Holguin, the master of a brigantine, or rather flat-boat, bolder
than the rest, drove through the fleet of canoes that occupied the
basin, until he encountered in the centre a canoe containing the person
of the emperor, whom he made prisoner and brought to Cortez, whereupon
the slaughter ceased.

Neither the horrid sight which the city presented, nor the fallen
fortunes of a brave enemy, could move the soul of Cortez. A brigand
knows no remorse and feels no pity. Gold had been the object of his
pious mission, and when he found not gold enough to satisfy the
cravings of his gang, he soaked the fallen emperor's feet in oil, and
then burned them at a slow fire, to extort from him a confession of the
place of concealment of his supposed treasure; and when, in after
years, he was tired of the burden of such a prisoner, he wantonly
hanged him up by the heels to die in a distant forest.

In this very city where Cortez tortured Guatemozin was a son of Cortez,
who inherited the spoils of his father's atrocities, put to the torture
by one of the Vice-kings, while the children's children of the
Conquistadors paid for the wealth they inherited in the terrible
penalties inflicted upon them by the buccaneers, that ravaged their
coasts for two hundred years. Have not the sins of the fathers been
visited upon the children?

The Aztecs, their empire, and their city, have long since disappeared;
their crimes, and the despotism which they exercised over the tribes
they had conquered, are all forgotten in the terrible catastrophe that
extinguished their national existence. Three hundred years of servitude
in the indiscriminate mass of Indian serfs has blotted out every
feeling of nationality. A few vagabonds among them still claim royal
descent, and, by virtue of their blood or their imposture, pretend to
exercise, in obscure villages, an un