Volume II Part 9 (1/2)

The swords and many of the domestic implements were of bronze; the arrows were tipped with quartz or bone, or points of gold and silver. A strict discipline was maintained on marching, granaries and depots being established at suitable distances on the roads. With a policy inflexibly persisted in, the G.o.ds of conquered countries were transported to Cuzco, and the vanquished compelled to wors.h.i.+p the Sun; their children were obliged to learn the Peruvian language, the government providing them teachers for that purpose. As an incitement, this knowledge was absolutely required as a condition for public office. To amalgamate the conquered districts thoroughly, their inhabitants were taken away by ten thousand, transported to distant parts of the empire, not, as in the Old World, to be worked to death as slaves, but to be made into Peruvians; an equal number of natives were sent in their stead, to whom, as a recompense for their removal, extraordinary privileges were given. It was the immemorial policy of the empire to maintain profound tranquillity in the interior and perpetual war on the frontiers.

The philosophical advancement of the Peruvians was much r.e.t.a.r.ded by their imperfect method of writing--a method greatly inferior to that of Egypt. [Sidenote: Peruvian literature--the quipus.] A cord of coloured threads, called quipus, was only indifferently suited to the purposes of enumeration, and by no means equal to hieroglyphics as a method of expressing general facts. But it was their only system. Notwithstanding this drawback, they had a literature consisting of poetry, dramatic compositions, and the like. Their scientific attainments were inferior to the Mexican. Their year was divided into months, their months into weeks. They had gnomons to indicate the solstices. One, in the form of an obelisk, in the centre of a circle, on which was marked an east and west line, indicated the equinox. These gnomons were destroyed by the Spaniards in the belief that they were for idolatrous purposes, for on the national festivals it was customary to decorate them with leaves and flowers. As the national religion consisted in the wors.h.i.+p of the Sun, it was not without reason that Quito was regarded as a holy place, from its position upon the equator.

[Sidenote: Agriculture carried to perfection.] In their extraordinary provisions for agriculture, the national pursuit, the skill of the Peruvians is well seen. A rapid elevation from the sea-level to the heights of the mountains gave them, in a small compa.s.s, every variety of climate, and they availed themselves of it. They terraced the mountain sides, filling the terraces with rich earth. They excavated pits in the sand, surrounded them with adobe walls, and filled them with manured soil. On the low level they cultivated bananas and ca.s.sava; on the terraces above, maize and quinoa; still higher, tobacco; and above that the potato. From a comparatively limited surface, they raised great crops by judiciously using manures, employing for that purpose fish, and especially guano. Their example has led to the use of the latter substance for a like purpose in our own times in Europe. The whole civilized world has followed them in the cultivation of the potato. The Peruvian bark is one of the most invaluable remedies. Large tracts of North America would be almost uninhabitable without the use of its active alkaloid quinine, which actually, in no insignificant manner, reduces the percentage mortality throughout the United States.

[Sidenote: The great aqueduct of Condesuya.] Indispensably necessary to their agricultural system were their great water-works. In Spain there was nothing worthy of being compared with them. The aqueduct of Condesuya was nearly 500 miles long. Its engineers had overcome difficulties in a manner that might well strike modern times with admiration. Its water was distributed as prescribed by law; there were officers to see to its proper use. From these great water-works and from their roads it may be judged that the architectural skill of the Peruvians was far from insignificant. They constructed edifices of porphyry, granite, brick; but their buildings were for the most part low, and suitable to an earthquake country.

[Sidenote: The stages of human development always the same.] I have dwelt at some length on the domestic history of Mexico and Peru because it is intimately connected with one of the philosophical principles which it is the object of this book to teach, viz., that human progress takes place under an unvarying law, and therefore in a definite way. The trivial incidents mentioned in the preceding paragraphs may perhaps have seemed insignificant or wearisome, but it is their very commonness, their very familiarity, that gives them, when rightly considered, a surprising interest. There is nothing in these minute details but what we find to be perfectly natural from the European point of view. They might be, for that matter, instead of reminiscences of the spontaneous evolution of a people shut out from the rest of the world by impa.s.sable oceans, a relation of the progress of some European or Asiatic nation.

The man of America advanced in his course of civilization as did the man of the Old World, devising the same inst.i.tutions, guided by the same intentions, constrained by the same desires. From the great features of his social system down to the little details of his domestic life, there is a sameness with what was done in Asia, Africa, Europe. But similar results imply a similar cause. What, then, is there possessed in common by the Chinese, the Hindoo, the Egyptian, the European, the American?

Surely not climate, nor equal necessities, nor equal opportunity. Simply nothing but this--corporeal organization! As automatons constructed in the same way will do the same things, so, in organic forms, sameness of structure will give rise to ident.i.ty of function and similarity of acts.

The same common sense guides men all over the world. Common sense is a function of common organization. All natural history is full of ill.u.s.trations. [Sidenote: a.n.a.logy between societies of men and societies of animals.] It may be offensive to our pride, but it is none the less true, that in his social progress, the free-will of which man so boasts himself in his individual capacity disappears as an active influence, and the domination of general and inflexible laws becomes manifest. The free-will of the individual is supplanted by instinct and automatism in the race. To each individual bee the career is open; he may taste of this flower and avoid that; he may be industrious in the garden, or idle away his time in the air; but the history of one hive is the history of another hive; there will be a predestined organization--the queen, the drones, the workers. In the midst of a thousand unforeseen, uncalculated, variable acts, a definite result, with unerring certainty, emerges; the combs are built in a pre-ordained way, and filled with honey at last. From bees, and wasps, and ants, and birds--from all that low animal life on which he looks with such supercilious contempt, man is destined one day to learn what in truth he really is.

[Sidenote: The crime of Spain in America.] For a second reason, also, I have dwelt on these details. The enormous crime of Spain in destroying this civilization has never yet been appreciated in Europe. After an attentive consideration of the facts of the case, I agree in the conclusion of Carli, that at the time of the conquest the moral man in Peru was superior to the European, and I will add, the intellectual man also. Was there in Spain, or even in all Europe, a political system carried out into the practical details of actual life, and expressed in great public works, as its outward visible and enduring sign, which could at all compare with that of Peru? Its only compet.i.tor was the Italian system, but that for long had been actively used to repress the intellectual advancement of man. [Sidenote: The Spaniard and the American.] In vain the Spaniards excuse their atrocities on the plea that a nation like the Mexican, which permitted cannibalism, should not be regarded as having emerged from the barbarous state, and that one which, like Peru, sacrificed human hecatombs at the funeral solemnities of great men, must have been savage. Let it be remembered that there is no civilized nation whose popular practices do not lag behind its intelligence; let it be remembered that in this respect Spain herself also was guilty. In America, human sacrifice was part of a religious solemnity, unstained by pa.s.sion. The auto da fe of Europe was a dreadful cruelty; not an offering to heaven, but a gratification of spite, hatred, fear, vengeance--the most malignant pa.s.sions of earth.

[Sidenote: European and American human sacrifice.] There was no spectacle on the American continent at which a just man might so deeply blush for his race as that presented in Western Europe when the heretic from whom confession had been wrung by torture pa.s.sed 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 G.o.d 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 n.o.blest creation of Heaven a worthless machine. To taste of human flesh is less criminal in the eye of G.o.d 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 a.s.serted 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 doc.u.ments 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 h.o.a.ry 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 pa.s.ses forward in his process of civilization, and collates therewith the prodigious works of art left by those two nations--an enduring evidence of the point to which they had attained--will find himself constrained to cast aside such idle a.s.sertions as altogether unworthy of confutation, or even of attention.

CHAPTER VI.

APPROACH OF THE AGE OF REASON IN EUROPE.

IT IS PRECEDED BY THE RISE OF CRITICISM.

_Restoration of Greek Literature and Philosophy in Italy.--Development of Modern Languages and Rise of Criticism.--Imminent Danger to Latin Ideas._

_Invention of Printing.--It revolutionizes the Communication of Knowledge, especially acts on Public Wors.h.i.+p, and renders the Pulpit of secondary importance._

THE REFORMATION.--_Theory of Supererogation and Use of Indulgences.--The Right of Individual Judgment a.s.serted.--Political History of the Origin, Culmination, and Check of the Reformation.--Its Effects in Italy._

_Causes of the Arrest of the Reformation.--Internal Causes in Protestantism.--External in the Policy of Rome.--The Counter-Reformation.

--Inquisition.--Jesuits.--Secession of the great Critics.--Culmination of the Reformation in America.--Emergence of Individual Liberty of Thought._

[Sidenote: The rise of criticism.] In estimating the influences of literature on the approach of the Age of Reason in Europe, the chief incidents to be considered are the disuse of Latin as a learned language, the formation of modern tongues from the vulgar dialects, the invention of printing, the decline of the power of the pulpit, and its displacement by that of the press. These, joined to the moral and intellectual influences at that time predominating, led to the great movement known as the Reformation.

[Sidenote: Epoch of the intellectual movement.] As if to mark out to the world the real cause of its intellectual degradation, the regeneration of Italy commenced with the exile of the popes to Avignon. During their absence, so rapid was the progress that it had become altogether impossible to make any successful resistance, or to restore the old condition of things on their return to Rome. The moment that the leaden cloud which they had kept suspended over the country was withdrawn, the light from heaven shot in, and the ready peninsula became instinct with life.

[Sidenote: Use of Latin as a sacred language.] The unity of the Church, and, therefore, its power, required the use of Latin as a sacred language. Through this Rome had stood in an att.i.tude strictly European, and was enabled to maintain a general international relation. It gave her far more power than her a.s.serted celestial authority, and, much as she claims to have done, she is open to condemnation that, with such a signal advantage in her hands, never again to be enjoyed by any successor, she did not accomplish much more. Had not the sovereign pontiffs been so completely occupied with maintaining their emoluments and temporalities in Italy, they might have made the whole Continent advance like one man. Their officials could pa.s.s without difficulty into every nation, and communicate without embarra.s.sment with each other, from Ireland to Bohemia, from Italy to Scotland. The possession of a common tongue gave them the administration of international affairs with intelligent allies everywhere speaking the same language.

[Sidenote: Causes of the dislike of Rome to the Greek,] Not, therefore, without cause was the hatred manifested by Rome to the restoration of Greek and introduction of Hebrew, and the alarm with which she perceived the modern languages forming out of the vulgar dialects. The prevalence of Latin was the condition of her power, its deterioration the measure of her decay, its disuse the signal of her limitation to a little princ.i.p.ality in Italy. In fact, the development of European languages was the instrument of her overthrow. They formed an effectual communication between the mendicant friars and the illiterate populace, and there was not one of them that did not display in its earliest productions a sovereign contempt for her. We have seen how it was with the poetry of Languedoc.

[Sidenote: and danger from modern languages.] The rise of the many-tongued European literature was therefore coincident with the decline of papal Christianity. European literature was impossible under the Catholic rule. A grand, and solemn, and imposing religious unity enforced the literary unity which is implied in the use of a single language. No more can a living thought be embodied in a dead language than activity be imparted to a corpse.

[Sidenote: Public disadvantages of a sacred tongue.] That principle of stability which Italy hoped to give to Europe essentially rested on the compulsory use of a dead tongue. The first token of intellectual emanc.i.p.ation was the movement of the great Italian poets, led by Dante, who often, not without irreverence, broke the spell. Unity in religion implies unity through a sacred language, and hence the non-existence of particular national literatures.

[Sidenote: Effect of modern languages.] Even after Rome had suffered her great discomfiture on the scientific question respecting the motion of the earth, the conquering party was not unwilling to veil its thoughts in the Latin tongue, partly because it thereby insured a more numerous cla.s.s of intelligent readers, and partly because ecclesiastical authority was now disposed to overlook what must otherwise be treated as offensive, since to write in Latin was obviously a pledge of abstaining from an appeal to the vulgar. The effect of the introduction of modern languages was to diminish intercommunication among the learned.

[Sidenote: Approach of a crisis in Europe.] The movement of human affairs, for so many years silent and imperceptible, was at length coming to a crisis. An appeal to the emotions and moral sentiments at the basis of the system, the history of which has occupied us so long, had been fully made, and found ineffectual. It was now the time for a like appeal to the understanding. Each age of life has its own logic.

The logic of the senses is in due season succeeded by that of the intellect. Of faith there are two kinds, one of acquiescence, one of conviction; and a time inevitably arrives when emotional faith is supplanted by intellectual.

[Sidenote: Cosmo de' Medici. Florence.] As if to prove that the impending crisis was not the offspring of human intentions, and not occasioned by any one man, though that man might be the sovereign pontiff, Nicolas V. found in his patronage of letters and art a rival and friend in Cosmo de' Medici. An instructive incident shows how great a change had taken place in the sentiments of the higher cla.s.ses: Cosmo, the richest of Italians, who had lavished his wealth on palaces, churches, hospitals, libraries, was comforted on his death-bed, not, as in former days would have been the case, by ministers of religion, but by Marsilius Ficinus, the Platonist, who set before him the arguments for a future life, and consoled his pa.s.sing spirit with the examples and precepts of Greek philosophy, teaching him thereby to exchange faith for hope, forgetting that too often hopes are only the day-dreams of men, not less unsubstantial and vain than their kindred of the night. Ficinus had perhaps come to the conviction that philosophy is only a higher stage of theology, the philosopher a very enlightened theologian.