There was another nation who seem to have far surpassed both Moors and Aztecs in the magnitude of their engineering-works for this purpose.  The Peruvians cut through mountains, filled up valleys, and carried whole rivers away in artificial channels to irrigate their thirsty soil.  The historians’ accounts of these water-works as they were, and even travellers’ descriptions of the ruins that still remain, fill us with astonishment.  It seems almost like some strange fatality that this nation too should have been conquered by the same race, the ruin of its great national works following immediately upon the Conquest.

Spain is rising again after long centuries of degradation, and is developing energies and resources which seem likely to raise it high among European nations, and the Spaniards are beginning to hold their own again among the peoples of Europe.  But they have had to pay dearly for the errors of their ancestors in the great days of Charles the Fifth.

The ancient Mexicans were not, it is true, to be compared with the Spanish Arabs or the Peruvians in their knowledge of agriculture and the art of irrigation; but both history and the remains still to be found in the country prove that in the more densely populated parts of the plains they had made considerable progress.  The ruined aqueduct of Tetzcotzinco which I have just mentioned was a grand work, serving to supply the great gardens of Nezahualcoyotl, which covered a large space of ground and excited the admiration of the Conquerors, who soon destroyed them, it is said, in order that they might not remain to remind the conquered inhabitants of their days of heathendom.

Such works as these seem, however, not to have extended over whole provinces as they did in Spain.  In the thinly peopled mountain-districts, the Indians broke up their little patches of ground with a hoe, and watered them from earthen jars, as indeed they do to this day.

The Spaniards improved the agriculture of the country by introducing European grain, and fruit-trees, and by bringing the old Roman plough, which is used to this day in Mexico as in Spain, where two thousand years have not superseded its use or even altered it.  Against these improvements we must set a heavy account of injury done to the country as regards its cultivation.  The Conquest cost the lives of several hundred thousand of the labouring class; and numbers more were taken away from the cultivation of the land to work as slaves for the conquerors in building houses and churches, and in the silver-mines.  When the inhabitants were taken away, the ground went out of cultivation, and much of it has relapsed into desert.  Even before the Conquest, Mexico had been suffering for many years from incessant wars, in which not only thousands perished on the field of battle, but the prisoners sacrificed annually were to be counted by thousands more, while famine carried off the women and children whose husbands and fathers had perished.  But the slaughter and famine of the first years of the Spanish Conquest far exceeded anything that the country had suffered before.