Hubert Howe Bancroft

“ O precious stone, O rich feather, O emerald, O sapphire, thou wert shaped where abide the great god and the great goddess that are above the heavens; created and formed thou wert by thy mother and father, Ometecutli and Omecioatl, the celestial woman and the celestial man. Thou hast come into this world, a place of many toils and troubles, of intemperate heat and intemperate cold and wind, a place of hunger and thirst, of weariness and of tears; of a verity we cannot say that this world is other than a place of weeping, of sadness, of vexation. ”

“ Threading their way among islands smothered in foliage, which seemed upon the glossy water-surface as floating fragments of the thickly matted verdure of the mainland, listening to notes unfamiliar to their ears, and seeing these strange men and women so like and yet so unlike Spaniards, they find themselves wondering whether they are in the world or out of it. We who so well know our little planet and its ways can scarcely imagine what it was in the darkness to be taken up at Seville, and put down amidst the magic play of light and shade at Darien. ”

“ Virtue then wars on virtue; this is the truth of it, for virtue is never wholly on one side, and he is virtuous who fights for what he believes right, whether he be rioht or not. Virtue then slays virtue, as vice kills vice. War and religion; strange companionship. One kills to cure, and the other cures to kill. Kill and call it honor; serve God and butcher his people!
Why should hate be glorified and deadly strife; that thing we so despise in brutes, prize-fighters, bull-fighters, duellists, and all that ilk, why in nations should we so exalt it? ”

“ Were every house destroyed and every street obliterated, there would still remain the city, with its commerce, its manufactures, its civilization, a spiritual city if you like, yet with material values incapable of destruction—an atmosphere alive with cheerful industry; also land values, commercial relations, financial connections, skilled laborers and professional men, and a hundred other like souls of things. In a thousand ideas and industries, though the ground is but ashes, the spirit of progress still hovers over the hills awaiting incarnation. ”

“ It was when, throughout this region of the Columbia, nature's wild magnificence was yet fresh; primeval forests unprofaned; lakes, and rivers, and rolling plains unswept; it was when countless villages dotted the luxuriant valleys; when from the warrior's camp-fire the curling smoke never ceased to ascend, nor the sounds of song and dance to be heard; when bands of gaily dressed savages roamed over every 155 hill-side; when humanity unrestrained vied with bird and beast in the exercise of liberty absolute. ”

“ A feeling of suffocation and deathly despair comes over the Spaniards as the dusky host fold them in closer and yet fiercer embrace. Hot falls the blood-reeking breath upon their faces, as, flushed with success and sure of their victims, the foe lay hold of the Spaniards to drag them away to the sacrifice. Rare offerings to the gods, indeed, are these magnificent men! And such they will surely become if Mary, Santiago, or the ready genius of Cortés appears not quickly to the rescue! ”

“ Peace is no more civilization than war, virtue than vice, good than evil. All these are the incidents, not the essence, of civilization.
That which we commonly call civilization is not an adjunct nor an acquirement of man; it is neither a creed nor a polity, neither science nor philosophy nor industry; it is rather the measure of progressional force implanted in man, the general fund of the nation's wealth, learning, and refinement, the storehouse of accumulated results, the essence of all best worth preserving from the distillations of good and the distillations of evil. ”

“ O Creator, O Former! thou that hearest and understandest us! abandon us not, forsake us not! O God, thou that art in heaven and on the earth, O Heart of Heaven, O Heart of Earth! give us descendants and a posterity as long as the light endure. Give us to walk always in an open road, in a path without snares; to lead happy, quiet, and peaceable lives, free of all reproach. ”

“ The primitive aboriginal life, not only in America but throughout the world, is wrapped in mystery. The clear light of history fades gradually, as we recede from the present age, into an ever-deepening shadow, which, beyond a varying indefinable point, a border-land of myth and fable, merges into the black night of antiquity. The investigations of modern science move back but slowly this bound between the past and present, and while the results in the aggregate are immense, in shedding new light on portions of the world's annals, progress toward the ultimate end is almost inappreciable. ”

“ The days of rigorous rule were ever the best days of France and Spain, and so it will be until the people become stronger than the strength of rulers. Republicanism is as unfit for stupid and unintellectual populations, as despotism would be for the advanced ideas and liberal institutions of Anglo-Saxon America. The subject of a liberal rule sneeringly crying down to the subject of an absolute rule his form of government, is like the ass crying to the tiger: Leave blood and meat; feed on grass and thistles, the only diet fit for civilized beasts! ”

“ From the living, the dying, and the dead, the clothes are torn. The store rooms are ransacked and the treasures carried off, the plunderers fighting among themselves for the spoils. What a sight is here, oh God! and all for liberty, all for tyranny; liberty or tyranny among some, with others, glory, gold, or plunder—among all with more or less of that horrid gratification a bloodhound feels as it tears its victim limb from limb and scatters around the bloody fragments. Blood! blood and mangled humanity everywhere. ”

“ Pinched by hunger, drenched by rain, midst the lightning and the thunder, they beat their way back over the soft soaked ground, braving the heavens and the earth which seemed to have risen against them. At night, if no deserted town afforded shelter, the worn-out men, after partaking of scanty fare and shivering in wet clothes round feeble camp fires, threw themselves upon the swampy ground to sleep. Yet with all their sufferings they did not scruple to destroy fields, burn such villages as fell in their way, and so reduce others to the same sad plight as themselves. ”

“ A grain of sand gives no conception of the earth, nor a drop of water of the sea, nor the soft breathing of an infant of a hurricane; yet worlds are made of atoms, and seas of drops of water, and storms of angry air-breaths. Though modern Mexico can boast a century more of history than the northern nations of America, as compared with the illimitable future her past is but a point of time. ”

“ Of all tyrannies, the tyranny of fashion is the most implacable; of all slaveries the slavery to fashion is the most abject; of all fears the fear of our fellows is the most overwhelming; of all the influences that surround and govern man the forms and customs which he encounters in society are the most domineering. It is the old story, only another turn of the wheel that grinds and sharpens and polishes humanity—at the first a benefit, now a drag. Forms and fashions are essential; we cannot live without them. If we have worship, government, commerce, or clothes, we must have forms ”

“ In view of what has been and is, can anyone call it a Utopian dream to picture the Pacific bordered by an advanced civilization with cities more brilliant than any of the ancient East, more opulent than any of the cultured West?
Rio de Janeiro! what have the Brazilians been doing these last decades? Decapitating politically dear Dom Pedro, true patriot, though emperor—he came to me once in my library, pouring out his soul for his beloved Brazil—they abolished slavery, formed a republic, and modernized the city. They made boulevards and water drives, the finest in the world. ”