One need not, however, lend himself to so complete a disillusionment as Mr. Morgan in this paper seeks to thrust upon us. Still more recent investigations, such as those of Brinton, McGee, and Bandelier, have restored some of the prestige which Cortés and his followers attached to the early Mexicans. While the Aztecs were very far from possessing a monarchical form of government, and while their society was constituted far differently from that of any European community, and while they are to be studied simply as one division of the Red Indian race, they were scarcely so primitive as Mr. Morgan would have us think. They differed from their more northern kindred not, to be sure, in kind, but very greatly in degree. Though we have to substitute the communal-house for the palace, the war-chief for the king, and the tribal organisation for the feudal system, there still remains a great and interesting people, fully organised, rich, warlike, and highly skilled in their own arts. In architecture, weaving, gold and silver work, and pottery, they achieved artistic wonders. Their instinct for the decorative produced results which justified the admiration of their conquerors. Their capital, though it was not the immense city which the Spaniards saw, teeming with a vast population, was, nevertheless, an imposing collection of mansions, great and small, whose snowy whiteness, standing out against the greenery and diversified by glimpses of water, might well impress the imagination of European strangers. If the communal-houses lacked the "golden cupolas" of Disraeli's Oriental fancy, neither were they the "mud huts" which Wilson tells of. If Montezuma was not precisely an occidental Charles the Fifth, neither is he to be regarded as an earlier Sitting Bull.