The books treating of Cortés’ achievements, as I have said, form an immense array, as may be expected from the importance and interest of what Robertson justly terms “the most memorable event in the conquest of America,” involving the subjugation of the richest and most advanced country therein, the fall of its beautiful and renowned city, and one of the most daring campaigns ever undertaken. The narrative reads indeed like a romance rather than history based on stern facts, and it is not strange that men have arisen who seek to cast doubt, not alone on certain incidents, but on the main features of the achievement and the field.
One method of doubt has been to lower the estimate of native culture and resources; to sneer at the large cities, magnificent palaces, regal state, certain industrial and fine arts, picture-writing, and other evidences of a higher culture. Such statements reveal to the experienced student a lamentable disregard or ignorance of evidence extant, of ruins with their massive form, their beautifully designed ornamentation, their admirable sculptured and plastic delineation of the human figure, both far in advance of the conventional specimens of Egypt, and the former equal in many respects to the productions of the higher Greek art. The picture-writing, again, reveals the phonetic element so developed as to endow the Mexicans with that high proof
of culture, written records, applied not only to historic incidents and common facts, but to abstract subjects of philosophic, scientific, and poetic nature, as instanced in my Native Races.
It needed not the official investigation instituted by the Spanish government to confirm the mute testimony of relics, and the vivid declaration of chroniclers. Native records exist in sufficient abundance to speak for themselves; records written by and for the people, and therefore free from any suspicion of misrepresentation; records used by a number of writers for obtaining that insight into esoteric features of Nahua institutions which could not well be acquired by Spaniards. The