[Footnote 109: The wretched prisoners were ordinarily compelled
to carry the booty.]

The tributary pueblos were also liable to be summoned to furnish a
contingent of warriors to the war-parties of the confederacy, under the
same penalties for delinquency as in the case of refusal of tribute. In
such cases it was quite common for the confederacy to issue a peremptory
summons, followed by a declaration of war. When a pueblo was captured,
the only way in which the vanquished people could stop the massacre was
by holding out signals of submission; a parley then sometimes adjusted
the affair, and the payment of a year's tribute in advance induced the
conquerors to depart, but captives once taken could seldom if ever be
ransomed. If the parties could not agree upon terms, the slaughter was
renewed, and sometimes went on until the departing victors left nought
behind them but ruined houses belching from loop-hole and doorway lurid
clouds of smoke and flame upon narrow silent streets heaped up with
mangled corpses.

The sway of the Aztec confederacy over the Mexican peninsula was thus
essentially similar to the sway of the Iroquois confederacy over a great
part of the tribes between the Connecticut river and the Mississippi.
It was simply the levying of tribute,--a system of plunder enforced by
terror. The so-called empire was "only a partnership formed for the
purpose of carrying on the business of warfare, and that intended, not
for the extension of territorial ownership, but only for an increase of
the means of subsistence."[110] There was none of that coalescence and
incorporation of peoples which occurs after the change from gentilism to
civil society has been effected. Among the Mexicans, as elsewhere
throughout North America, the tribe remained intact as the highest
completed political integer.

[Footnote 110: Bandelier, _op. cit._ p. 563.]

[Sidenote: Aztec clans.]

The Aztec tribe was organized in clans and phratries, and the number of
clans would indicate that the tribe was a very large one.[111] There
were twenty clans, called in the Nahuatl language "calpullis." We may
fairly suppose that the average size of a clan was larger than the
average tribe of Algonquins or Iroquois; but owing to the compact "city"
life, this increase of numbers did not result in segmentation and
scattering, as among Indians in the lower status. Each Aztec clan seems
to have occupied a number of adjacent c