Note 989 — Chapter III

Bandelier’s papers are in the second volume of the Reports of the Peabody Museum at Cambridge. He contends in his “Art of Warfare among the Ancient Mexicans,” that he has shown the non-existence of a military despotism, and proved their government to be “a military democracy, originally based upon communism in living.” A similar understanding pervades his other essay “On the social organization and mode of government of the ancient Mexicans.” Morgan and Bandelier profess great admiration for each other,—Morgan citing his friend as “our most eminent scholar in Spanish American history” (Houses, etc., 84), and Bandelier expresses his deep feeling of gratitude, etc. (Archæolog. Tour, 32). This affectionate relation has very likely done something in unifying their intellectual sympathies. The Ancient Society, or researches in the lines of human progress from savagery through barbarism to civilization (N. Y. 1877), of Morgan is reflected very palpably in these papers of Bandelier. The accounts of the war of the conquest, as detailed in Bancroft’s Mexico (vol. i.), and the views of their war customs (Native Races, ii. ch. 13), contrasted with Bandelier’s ideas,—who finds in Parkman’s books “the natural parallelism between the forays of the Iroquois and the so-called conquests of the Mexican confederacy” (Archæol. Tour, 32), and who reduces the battle of Otumba to an affair like that of Custer and the Sioux (Art of Warfare),—give us in the military aspects of the ancient life the opposed views of the two schools of interpreters.