that presented in Western Europe when the heretic
from whom confession had been wrung by torture passed to his stake in a
sleeveless garment, with flames of fire and effigies of an abominable
import depicted upon it. Let it be remembered that by the Inquisition,
from 1481 to 1808, 340,000 persons had been punished, and of these
nearly 32,000 burnt. Let what was done in the south of France be
remembered. Let it be also remembered that, considering the
worthlessness of the body of man, and that, at the best, it is at last
food for the worm--considering the infinite value of his immortal soul,
for the redemption of which the agony and death of the Son of God were
not too great a price to pay--indignities offered to the body are less
wicked than indignities offered to the soul. It would be well for him
who comes forward as an accuser of Mexico and Peru in their sin to
dispose of the fact that at that period the entire authority of Europe
was directed to the perversion, and even total repression of thought--to
an enslaving of the mind, and making that noblest creation of Heaven a
worthless machine. To taste of human flesh is less criminal in the eye
of God than to stifle human thought.

[Sidenote: Antiquity of American civilization.] Lastly, there is another
point to which I will with brevity allude. It has been widely asserted
that Mexican and Peruvian civilization was altogether a recent affair,
dating at most only two or three centuries before the conquest. It would
be just as well to say that there was no civilization in India before
the time of the Macedonian invasion because there exist no historic
documents in that country anterior to that event. The Mexicans and
Peruvians were not heroes of a romance to whom wonderful events were of
common occurrence, whose lives were regulated by laws not applying to
the rest of the human race, who could produce results in a day for which
elsewhere a thousand years are required. They were men and women like
ourselves, slowly and painfully, and with many failures, working out
their civilization. The summary manner in which they have been disposed
of reminds us of the amusing way in which the popular chronology deals
with the hoary annals of Egypt and China. Putting aside the imperfect
methods of recording events practised by the autochthons of the Western
world, he who estimates rightly the slowness with which man passes
forward in his process of civilization, and collates therewith t