Peru. Incidents of Travel and Exploration in the Land of the Incas. By E. George Squier, late United States Commissioner to Peru. New York: Harper & Brothers.
Mr. Squier does not give us the date of his explorations in Peru, but he tells us that they occupied him two years, during which he "crossed and recrossed the Cordillera and the Andes from the Pacific to the Amazonian rivers, sleeping in rude Indian huts or on bleak punas in the open air, in hot valleys or among eternal snows, gathering with eager zeal all classes of facts relating to the country, its people, its present and its past." It must not be inferred from this description that he claims the honors of a pioneer or discoverer. Many previous travellers had pursued the same quest, encountered the same hardships and described the same objects. Few of them, however, had enjoyed the same advantages or possessed equal fitness for the task. His previous studies and investigations had familiarized him with the aboriginal history of America and with many of its existing relics; his appointment as commissioner of the United States to Peru for the settlement of some disputed claims gave him facilities which, as a foreigner, he might otherwise have lacked; and his equipments both for personal comfort and for scientific and artistic purposes seem to have been as complete as a single traveller could be expected to provide. The result is a work which, if not actually the ablest, is the most thorough and satisfactory, which the subject has yet called forth. It contrasts in all respects with the latest of its predecessors, Hutchinson's Two Years in Peru, a book of still greater size, but deficient in all the elements of critical and literary power, while replete with pretentiousness and dogmatism. In the narration of his journeys and adventures Mr. Squier is always entertaining; his account of the present condition of the country and the people is instructive, though somewhat meagre; his descriptions of ancient remains, if not always as vivid or even as clear as one might desire, are generally more careful and minute than any that have before been given of them, and are supplemented by admirable views and plans that add greatly to the value and attractiveness of the volume. Finally, while his knowledge and training have well qualified him to form independent judgments, he neither seeks to discredit all previous research nor to support any of the fantastic theories of which American antiquarianism has been so prolific. He was not open to the temptation that leads those who are first in the field to magnify its marvels, and he is equally free from that tendency to belittle them which betrays the desire of later explorers to display their own superior acumen. He makes no attempt to reconstruct the past by piecing together accumulated details and calling to his aid the imaginative faculty, which, in history and science as well as in art, gives form and life to its material. But his conclusions, if general in nature and limited in range, are such as commend themselves to all minds competent to grasp the problems presented and not led astray by prepossessions. He finds the existing relics in Peru substantiating in the main the accounts given by the Spanish writers of its condition at the time of the Conquest, and he finds that condition accordant with the early history of civilization under similar circumstances in other parts of the world. He does not think it necessary, therefore, either to account for the existence of those monuments with the ruins of which the soil is so thickly strewn by an immigration from India or Egypt, nor to reduce them to the proportions and character of the Pueblo remains in New Mexico, in order to prove that America, in contrast with the Eastern continent, has had but one original type of development, and that the lowest. On the contrary, he holds it certain that "the civilization of the ancient Peruvians was indigenous," and he considers it to have passed through several stages, and to have proceeded independently among different races and tribes, culminating at last in the organization of a national polity and a common rule. Under that rule he believes that "the material prosperity of the country was far in advance of what it is now. There were greater facilities of intercourse, a wider agriculture, more manufacture, less pauperism and vice, and—shall I say it?—a purer and more useful religion." With the ruins that throw light upon the "customs, modes of life, and political, social and domestic organization" of "the vanished empire of the Incas," are others that point to a wholly different state of society and an immeasurable antiquity. "Combined with the stupendous and elaborate remains of Tiahuanuco—remains as elaborate and admirable as those of Assyria, of Egypt, Greece or Rome—there are others that are almost exact counterparts of those of Stonehenge, and Carnac in Brittany, to which is assigned the remotest place in monumental history. The rude sun-circles of Sillustani, under the very shadow of some of the most elaborate, and architecturally the most wonderful, works of aboriginal America, are indistinguishable counterparts of the sun-circles of England, Denmark and Tartary." Such evidence, concurrent with that which abounds in more northern regions, points unmistakably to an early development on this continent, similar in character and course, and coeval or anterior in date, to that which has left like indications in so many parts of the Eastern hemisphere. There the records are more scattered and more varied, as from the size and conformation of the continents and the greater diversities of climate we might have expected them to be; and those at least of a later period are, from the nature of the case, more easy of interpretation in the light of legend, tradition and written history. But the general features are intelligible in all, and the revelation which they make is identical. They show the human mind, under like external conditions and with like internal conceptions, advancing on the same line from barbarism to culture; they show a struggle and rivalry of races and tribes, in which one or another shoots forward for a time, and is then outstripped or pushed aside; they show a gradual sifting, blending and consolidation, in which primitive and fortuitous forms of association are superseded by a system presenting the symmetry and composite character of an artificial structure. Everywhere the process is marked by the final predominance of two principles, which stimulate, direct and regulate all the efforts that are made toward artistic expression, industrial science and social organization. For the human mind at this stage all conceptions of Nature may be comprised under the name of religion, and all ideas of order and co-operation under that of monarchical rule. The monuments of this period that have sprung from the united labor of the community all attest the control and supervision of one or both of these powers. Not only do temples and palaces bear this stamp, but all public works of whatever nature testify, by the gigantic results in comparison with the deficient means, to such an authority in those who planned them and such a subordination in those by whom they were executed as cannot be conceived of either under the looser organizations of barbarism or the more equitable arrangements of modern life. The cyclopean walls, the imposing edifices, the subterranean aqueducts, the mountain terraces, of Peru tell the same tale as pyramids and temples, towers and palaces, in Egypt, Assyria or India. The critic who can find in the ruins at Gran Chimu and Pachacamac only "communal houses" inhabited by "groups of families" on the method of the Iroquois, in the vast isolated structures of Tiahuanuco the remains of "an Indian pueblo after the ordinary form," and in the enormous and elaborate fortifications of Cuzco and Ollantay-tambo the works of village communities and petty tribes, is not only bent on the support of a theory at whatever cost of truth and sense, but predetermined, one would say, to hold it as a monopoly. Compared with absurdities of this order, the wildest imaginings of M. Brasseur de Bourbourg are entitled to be ranked with the conjectures of a sane philosophy.
Mr. Squier, as we have seen, gives no countenance to baseless speculations, and the publication of his book has, it is evident, fallen on them as a heavy blow and great discouragement. The preciseness of his details gives a force and authority to both his statements and opinions which cannot easily be evaded or resisted even by those most given to substituting assumptions for evidence and facts. His descriptions of the stone-work of the ancient Peruvians are not likely to suggest to unsophisticated readers an identity of race and institutions with the inhabitants of wigwams. "The joints are all of a precision unknown in our architecture, and not rivalled in the remains of ancient art that had fallen under my notice in Europe. The statement of the old writers, that the accuracy with which the stones of some structures were fitted together was such that it was impossible to introduce the thinnest knife-blade or finest needle between them, may be taken as strictly true. The world has nothing to show in the way of stone-cutting and fitting to surpass the skill and accuracy displayed in the Indian structures of Cuzco. All modern work of the kind there—and there are some fine examples of skill—looks rude and barbarous in comparison." We may imagine the straits to which the advocates of Lo are driven when they point to the absence of mortar or cement of any kind in such walls as a proof of rudeness and ignorance in the builders. But, as Mr. Squier reminds us, Humboldt found a true mortar in the ruins of Pullal and Canuar, in Northern Peru. Humboldt found, too, in the same region the remains of paved roads not inferior to any Roman roads which he had seen in Italy, France or Spain; and though Mr. Squier states that few traces of such roads now exist in the southern part of the country, and infers that they never existed here, since "the modern pathways must follow the ancient lines," and "there is no reason why they should have suffered more from time and the elements in one part of the country than in another," it seems to us impossible to reject in so summary a fashion the testimony of early writers, given, not in mere general terms, but with a minuteness of description rivalling his own. Possibly, the explanation may be found partly in the fact that the roads in one part of the country were generally more ancient than in the other—many of them, as we know, dating from a period anterior to the Inca rule—and partly to the greater devastations wrought by the European conquerors and their descendants in the neighborhood of the capital and on the most frequented routes. In other particulars, such as the size of the Peruvian houses and the existence of windows, Mr. Squier finds the facts to have been understated by Humboldt. Generally, as we have already intimated, he finds full confirmation of the accounts of such writers as Cieza de Leon and Garcilasso de la Vega in those relics which still survive as the surest witnesses of the past, defying the tooth of time, the ravages of violence and the denials and assumptions of a crazy scepticism.
Camp, Court and Siege: A Narrative of Personal Adventure and Observation during Two Wars, 1861-65, 1870-71. By Wickham Hoffman. New York: Harper & Brothers.
Had the third of this book which is devoted to the writer's reminiscences of the late civil convulsion in his own country been omitted or reserved for expansion into a separate publication, the remainder would have had more unity and attractiveness. The latter is by far the more interesting portion. Expanded and fortified by details, references and documents, Major Hoffman's account of his experience as secretary of legation at Paris in the year of the siege might have filled—and may yet be made to fill—an important place among memoirs of its class. His narrative style is clear and pleasant, if never vivid or impressive. It harmonizes with the complexion of truth, and truth is the first thing we ask from the diarist and observer. Our confidence is won by his direct and unambitious way of telling what he saw and shared.
We should think it not improbable that the writer will adopt this course, and use more fully the material which must be at his command for illustrating, from an exceptionally favorable point of view, the fall of the Second Empire and the double fall of its capital. The American legation, under Mr. Washburne, was brought into close relations with the Empire, the Republic and the Commune by means of its delegated character as protector of North German subjects during the war. It was, for that period, much the most notable among the foreign embassies in France. While those of the principal European powers, as for most of the time the French government itself, left the capital, it, with the representatives of two or three minor states, remained at its post. Outside of the very onerous function assumed by it at the request of the German government, it had other great cares and great opportunities for good. These appear to have been encountered and used with remarkable tact and energy. Its display of those qualities has been gratefully acknowledged by its own people, those of Germany and many of the French. At the outbreak of the war thirty thousand Germans were established in Paris. Summary expulsion was decreed against these, and the American minister and his subordinates had the sole charge of applying the meagre funds sent by their own sovereign for mitigating the suffering due to that order. Some thousands, unable to leave or preferring to run all risks, remained throughout the war. This unhappy remnant constantly looked to the American ministry for aid to subsist and to escape violence. Mr. Hoffman ventures to place the banishment of the Germans, for acuteness if not mass of suffering, by the side of the ejection of the Huguenots and the Moors. This exaggeration serves at least to show the impression it made on an eye-witness.
Major Hoffman's remarks on the causes of the moral breakdown of the Empire and of the French army do not help us to much that is novel. He lays more than the usual stress on Ultramontanism as an influence. The death of the archbishop of Paris could have been prevented, he thinks, had the Versailles authorities acted with due promptness and determination; and he avers his belief that the liberalism of that prelate made his death not unacceptable to the Church party represented now by Eugénie and MacMahon. He ascribes fanaticism also to the savior of Paris that was to be—Trochu. Trochu's main hope, he believes, was miraculous interposition. His statement of the extent to which unreasoning panic had possession of both soldiers and citizens supports the idea that supernatural aid only could have saved the city.
The better, and really ruling, traits of the French people are not to be studied in their periods of "Gallic fury." Thus it is that the book before us is an unsafe guide on that point. Six years have rolled away since the revolt of the Commune, the loss of two rich provinces and the imposition of a tribute nearly half as large as the debt of the United States. The evidence given and the effective results shown of patience, perseverance, order, determined good faith, industry and self-control have no parallel in a like period of the history of any modern people.
The Plains of the Great West and their Inhabitants. By R. I. Dodge. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons.
Here we are favored with a glance through another military lorgnette, but at a scene geographically, socially and politically the antipodes of Paris. Colonel Dodge leads us into the haunts of the original denizens of Western America, and depicts their traits with a hand made facile by long familiarity. At part of the aborigines—and that part obviously most attractive to and most assiduously studied by him—he bids us look through the sights of the rifle or along the dappled double-barrel. At the other he essays, with less success perhaps, to aid us with the eye of the amateur statesman and political economist. The wearers of fur and feather have no moral side. The Indian has. His condition and future are correspondingly complicated. How to shoot him is not the sole and simple question, as it is with his original compatriots except the buffalo. With the latter shaggy and multitudinous creature the fate of the Indian of the Plains is more or less linked. They move together, and may be said to die together. On a map of the territory between the Rocky Mountains and the Mississippi are traced two pairs of reservations. Of one the Yellowstone, and of the other the Arkansas, is the centre. Each pair is composed of a buffalo-range and a group of Indian tribes. The three lines of east-and-west railway separate them, and shoulder to right and left, north and south, the savage and his herds.