Mexico was ruled by the head family group in the City of Mexico, which Bandelier[1] has shown rose from the determined head of a warlike people that the preceding government had failed to conquer. When once upon its feet, this ruling family conquered, one by one, the surrounding cities and forced them to pay tribute. The system was thus plainly a matter of military rule, arbitrary and absolute. Apparently, this power had not yet seized the entire social machinery of production as in Peru, but was in a fair way to do so when the Spaniards came.
The same form of growth by conquest of city after city is apparent in the Inca scheme, while in Colombia it was still in its incipient stage. These main characteristics will best enable us to comprehend this remarkable development.
It is probable that underlying governments so built up, there must necessarily have been originally a considerable diversity of language and social custom. As to the attitude of the several governments toward these subjected groups, we are left in doubt, but both in Mexico and in Peru the conquered were required to participate in the official religious practices, or perhaps we should say that because each military and other governmental act was accompanied by ritualistic observances, the conquered could not conform to one without the other. The Inca seem to have developed the method of dispersing refractory social groups over the empire as a means of decreasing resistance.
Outside of the Andean region, the family group appears to be the prevailing independent unit, but, as elsewhere, the tendency is for two or more of these to live together under some kind of a federation. So far as we know, no strong subjecting tendencies were developed by any of these federations. The Araucanians seem to have formed a very efficient organization for the common defense, since neither the Inca nor the Spaniard succeeded in subjecting them; yet they seem not to have developed the missionary idea of extending their culture by conquest.
In North America we find upon the frontier of the Mexican state a large number of pueblos, each village or group of vil-
- ↑ Bandelier, 1879. I.
