Human sacrifices were offered annually among the Aztecs, but never among the Iroquois. But even these were not entirely the result of Indian barbarity. “Human sacrifices have been practised by many nations, not excepting the most polished nations of antiquity.” “They were of frequent occurrence among the Greeks, as every school-boy knows, and in Egypt. In Rome they were so common as to require to be interdicted by an express law, less than a hundred years before the Christian Era,—a law recorded in a very honest strain of exultation by Pliny, notwithstanding which, traces of the existence of the practice may be discerned to a much later period.”[5]
Zurita was an eminent jurist from Spain, who resided nineteen years among the Aztecs, and is indignant that they should be called barbarians, saying, “It is an epithet which could come from no one who had personal knowledge of the capacity of the people or their institutions, and which in some respects is quite as well merited by Europeans.”
If the Aztecs did not deserve the term barbarians, surely I shall be thought just in denying the term savage to belong to the Iroquois; and from their mythology, if nothing else, it is evident that they were destitute neither of genius nor of poetry. They were heathen and Pagans, but not savages, and before we boast that we have attained [[66]]unto perfection, let us remember that Spiritualists and Mormons have arisen in the nineteenth century, and multitudes have wended their way to Salt Lake City, who were trained in the churches of New England!
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