burial in the robes worn by the goddess of strong drink, his patron saint. Drunkenness in young people, since it unfitted them for public duty, was punishable with death, though the same fault was winked at in an older person. Slanderers fared somewhat better, and escaped with singed hair. Any member of the calpulli who failed to till the little portion of the public land assigned to him became an outcast, and was condemned to menial service. If he failed to till the lands of any minor for whom he was guardian, his breach of trust was punished with death.
True slavery, in our sense of that word, was unknown among these people. As outcasts they forfeited their tribal privileges, but could be readopted by their brethren after some meritorious act.
It was a capital offence to wear any part of a chiefs regalia or for a man or a woman to put on the dress belonging to the other sex or to change the boundaries of lands. These old communal lands were most jealously guarded. The people had strong local attachments, and it is said that thousands in Mexico are still living on the plots of ground tilled by their ancestors hundreds of years ago. Many of these were not Aztecs, though most of them had been at some time tributary to them.
We learn from picture-records that four cities on the coast of Mexico paid each, yearly, four thousand handfuls of the feathers needed in the exquisite mosaic-work for which these tribes were so famous, two hundred bags of cocoa, forty tiger-skins, one hundred and sixty kinds of certain colors needed in the temple-worship or for personal decoration. Other places paid tribute in cochineal, dyestuffs, gold, precious stones, besides the victims for sacrifice—the most valuable of all revenues.
