ours, and that we too are only in a transitional stage. [Illustration: SCULPTURES FROM TERRACE EAST OF THE GREAT PLAZA, COPAN] The Amerind people, like ourselves, represent merely a stage of human progress. Our stage is in advance of theirs, but it is by no means perfection. We do not scalp, but the revolver is quite as active as their scalping-knife, and we require a great number of policemen to keep us civilised. As for war, the European race has certainly not been backward in that respect. In Europe to-day vast bodies of men are withdrawn from every other service and trained for war with a completeness that the Amerind never dreamed of; and in the United States we have probably already killed more men in wars than ever at one time peopled it in aboriginal days. For in those days the various groups of Amerinds were separated by tracts of unoccupied territory; unoccupied except as the hunters roamed over it in search of their food, and the population outside of the Aztec country and Central America was generally sparse. Nor was the distribution of this population always the same as it was revealed to us by the Discovery. Tribes developed, rose to power, declined and passed away, leaving little, where their art development was slight, to indicate their former presence, no matter what may have been the degrees of their political attainments. Had not our own history come in to rescue the confederacy of the Iroquois, their remains, assuming them to have declined without further art development, would have conveyed no suspicion of their political organisation.