ndians, the school
for their exercise is entirely broken up. Degraded as the Indians are
now, they are not lower in the scale of intellect than the serfs of
Russia, while it is a well-known fact that the greatest architect in
that country, the builder of the Cazan Church at St. Petersburgh, was
taken from that abject class, and by education became what he is. In my
opinion, teaching might again lift up the Indian, might impart to him
the skill to sculpture stone and carve wood; and if restored to
freedom, and the unshackled exercise of his powers of mind, there might
again appear a capacity to originate and construct, equal to that
exhibited in the ruined monuments of his ancestors.

The last argument, and that upon which most stress has been laid,
against the hypothesis that the cities were constructed by the
ancestors of the present Indians, is the alleged absence of historical
accounts in regard to the discovery or knowledge of such cities by the
conquerors. But it is manifest that even if this allegation were true,
the argument would be unsound, for it goes to deny that such cities
ever existed at all. Now there can be no doubt as to the fact of their
existence; and as it is never pretended that they were erected since
the conquest, they must be allowed to have been standing at that time.
Whether erected by the Indians or by races perished and unknown,
whether desolate or inhabited, beyond all question the great buildings
were there; if not entire, they must at least have been far more so
than they are now; if desolate, perhaps more calculated to excite
wonder than if inhabited; and in either case the alleged silence of the
historian would be equally inexplicable.

But the allegation is untrue. The old historians are not silent. On the
contrary, we have the glowing accounts of Cortez and his companions, of
soldiers, priests, and civilians, all concurring in representations of
existing cities, then in the actual use and occupation of the Indians,
with buildings and temples, in style and character like those presented
in these pages. Indeed, these accounts are so glowing that modern
historians, at the head of whom stands Robertson, have for that reason
thrown discredit over them, and ascribed them to a heated imagination.
To my mind, they bear on the face of them the stamp of truth, and it
seems strange that they have been deemed worthy of so little reliance.
But Robertson wrote upon the authority of correspondents i