In connection with the Village Indians of other parts of Mexico and Central America, and of Peru, they afforded the best exemplification of this condition of ancient society then existing on the earth. They represented one of the great stages of progress toward civilization in which the institutions derived from a previous ethnical period are seen in higher advancement, and which were to be transmitted, in the course of human experience, to an ethnical condition still higher, and undergo still further development before civilization was possible. But the Village Indians were not destined to attain the Upper Status of barbarism so well represented by the Homeric Greeks.
The Indian pueblos in the valley of Mexico revealed to Europeans a lost condition of ancient society, which was so remarkable and peculiar that it aroused at the time an insatiable curiosity. More volumes have been written, in the proportion of ten to one, upon the Mexican aborigines and the Spanish Conquest, than upon any other people of the same advancement, or upon any event of the same importance. And yet, there is no people concerning whose institutions and plan of life so little is accurately known. The remarkable spectacle presented so inflamed the imagination that romance swept the field, and has held it to the present hour. The failure to ascertain the structure of Aztec society which resulted was a serious loss to the history of mankind. It should not be made a cause of reproach to any one, but rather for deep regret. Even that which has been written, with such painstaking industry, may prove useful in some future attempt to reconstruct the history of the Aztec confederacy. Certain facts remain of a positive kind from which other facts may be deduced; so that it is not improbable that a well-directed original investigation may yet recover, measurably at least, the essential features of the Aztec social system.
The "kingdom of Mexico" as it stands in the early histories, and the "empire of Mexico" as it appears in the later, is a fiction of the imagination. At the time there was a seeming foundation for describing the government as a monarchy, in the absence of a correct knowledge of their institutions; but the misconception can no longer be defended. That which the Spaniards found was simply a confederacy of three Indian tribes, of which the counterpart existed in all parts of the continent, and they had no occasion in their descriptions to advance a step beyond this single fact. The government was administered by a council of chiefs, with the co-operation of a general commander of the military bands. It was a government of two powers; the civil being represented by the council, and the military by a principal war-chief. Since the institutions of the confederate tribes were essentially democratical, the government may be called a military democracy, if a designation more special than confederacy is required.