If they had any such desire, their own conduct was more than sufficient to account for the refusal of Montezuma to act upon their suggestion; and the letters of Cortés himself, as well as the writings of many of his companions and contemporaries, show that what defects the visitor in Mexico may see to-day in the social organization are precisely of the kind of Christianity which the Spaniards taught by their example. The vices their chroniclers denounce in the emperor and native princes on one page, they themselves adopt on the next; and the most revolting practices, abhorrent to faith, and ruinous of the most firmly organized society, find avowals in language intermixed with prayers and ejaculations of devotion. They charge the natives with superstition: they were themselves superstitious. They charge the natives with low morals: they added lower ones, if lower were possible. They charge the natives with cruelty: they set up the Inquisition among them to enable the State to be cruel, while the name of the Church was borrowed to wear the responsibility, and carry down to our own time the reproach.[1] They charge the natives with
- ↑ Janvier, p. 27.
