Destruction of the aborigines of Mexico.

— We are written to from Bordeaux:

“Reading in Lamartine’s Civilisateur the letters of Christopher Columbus on the state of Mexico at the moment of the discovery, the following passage particularly caught our attention:

“Nature there, says Columbus, is so prodigal that property has not created the sentiment of avarice or of cupidity. These men seem to live in an age of gold, happy and tranquil amid open gardens without limits, which are neither surrounded by ditches, nor divided by palisades, nor defended by walls. They act loyally toward one another, without law, without books, without judges. They look upon as a wicked man the one who takes pleasure in harming another. This horror of the good against the wicked seems to be their whole legislation. “Their religion is merely the sentiment of inferiority, of gratitude, and of love for the Invisible Being who had lavished upon them life and happiness.

“There is in the Universe no better nation nor better country; they love their neighbors as themselves; they always have a gentle and gracious language and the smile of tenderness upon their lips. They go naked, it is true, but clothed in candor and innocence.”

“According to this picture, these peoples were infinitely superior, not only to their invaders, but they would still be so today, in comparison with the peoples of the most civilized countries. The Spaniards took nothing of their virtues and contaminated them with their vices; in exchange for their good welcome, they brought them nothing but slavery and death. These unfortunate ones were, in great part, exterminated, and the little that remains of them became perverted through contact with the conquerors. “In the face of these results, one asks:

“Where is the progress, and what moral benefit did Humanity reap from so much blood shed? Would it not have been better that old Europe should have remained ignorant of the New World, so happy before that discovery?

“To that question, my spiritual guide answered thus:

“We would answer you with pleasure, if your spirit were in a condition to deal, at this moment, with so serious a subject, one that requires some Spiritist-philosophical developments. Address yourself to Kardec. This order of ideas has already been debated, but they will return to it in a more lucid manner than you could do it, because you always have your spirit tense and your ear on the watch. It is a consequence of your present position and to it you must submit.”

— From this results a first instruction, namely, that it is not enough to be a medium, even a formed and developed one, to obtain at will communications upon the first subject that arises. That one had made his proofs, but, at the moment, his own spirit, strongly and painfully preoccupied with other things, did not have the necessary calm. It is thus that a thousand circumstances may oppose themselves to the exercise of the mediumistic faculty; the faculty does not for that reason cease to subsist, but it is nothing without the concurrence of the Spirits, who grant it or refuse it, according as they judge fitting, and this, often, in the interest of the medium himself. As for the principal question, here is the answer obtained at the Society of Paris:

(July 8, 1864. – Medium: Mr. d’Ambel.)

“Under the appearances of a certain natural goodness, and with customs more gentle than virtuous, the Incas lived indolently, without progressing nor rising. Struggle was lacking to these primitive races; and if bloody battles did not decimate them; if an individual ambition did not exercise there a sovereign pressure to hurl those populations into wars of conquest, they were nonetheless no less affected by the dangerous virus that was leading their race to extinction. It was necessary to retemper the vital sources of those degenerate Incas, of whom the Aztecs represented the fatal decadence that was to strike all those peoples. To these entirely physiological causes, if we add the moral causes, we shall note that the level of the sciences and of the arts had there likewise remained in prolonged infancy. There was, therefore, utility in putting those peaceful regions on the same level as the Western races. Today the race is judged to have disappeared, because it was fused with the family of the Spanish conquerors. From that crossed race there arose a new and vivacious nation which, by a vigorous impulse, will not be long in catching up with the peoples of the old continent. What remains of so much blood shed? they ask from Bordeaux. First, the blood shed was not so considerable as one might believe. Before the firearms and a few soldiers of Pizarro, the whole invaded nation submitted as if it were before demigods risen from the waters. It is almost an episode of ancient mythology, and that indigenous race is, in several respects, similar to those who defended the Golden Fleece.”

[Erastus.]

— To this judicious explanation we shall add some reflections:

From the anthropological point of view, the extinction of races is a positive fact. From the point of view of philosophy, it is still a problem. From the point of view of religion, the fact is irreconcilable with the justice of God, if one admits for man a single corporeal existence to decide his future for eternity. Indeed, the races that become extinct are always races inferior to those that succeed them; can they have in the future life a position identical to that of the more perfected races? Simple good sense repels this idea, for, otherwise, the labor we perform to better ourselves would be useless, and it would make no difference whether we remained savages. The non-preexistence of the soul necessarily implies, for each race, the creation of new souls, more perfect, as they leave the hands of the Creator, a hypothesis incompatible with the principle of all justice. On the contrary, everything is explained if we admit one same point of departure for all and a succession of progressive existences. In the extinction of races, in general only the material being is taken into account, the only one that is destroyed, while the spiritual being is forgotten, which is indestructible and only changes its garment, because the first was no longer in relation with its moral and intellectual development. Let us suppose the whole black race destroyed: only the black garment will be destroyed; but the Spirit, which lives always, will assume, initially, a body intermediate between the black and the white, and, later, a white body. It is thus that the being, placed on the last rung of Humanity, will attain, in a given time, the sum of perfections compatible with the state of our globe. It is well not to lose sight of the fact that the extinction of races reaches only the body, in nothing affecting the Spirit; this latter, far from suffering from it, gains a more perfected instrument, provided with cerebral resources that respond to a greater number of faculties. The Spirit of a savage, incarnated in the body of a European scientist, would be no wiser nor would he know what to do with his instrument, whose inactive fibers would atrophy; the Spirit of a scientist, incarnated in the body of a savage, would be there like a great pianist before a piano lacking the majority of its strings. This thesis was developed in an article of the Review of the month of April 1862, on the perfectibility of the black race. The white Caucasian race is, without contradiction, the one that occupies the first place on Earth. But has it attained the apogee of perfection? Are all the faculties of the soul represented in it? Who would dare say so? Let us suppose, then, that, progressing continually, the Spirits of that race ended by no longer finding physical space: such a race would disappear to give place to another, of a better-endowed organization. Thus does the law of progress will it. Are there not already to be seen, in the white race, well-marked nuances, as to moral and intellectual development? We may be certain that the most advanced will absorb the others. The disappearance of races operates in two ways: in some, by natural extinction, in consequence of climatic conditions and of degeneration, when they remain isolated; in others, by conquests and by the dispersion that results from crossings. It is known that from the black race and the white race there came an intermediate race, much superior to the first, and which is as it were a rung for the Spirits of the latter. Then, the fusion of blood gives place to the alliance of the Spirits, of whom the most advanced aid the progress of the others. In this regard, who can foresee the consequences of the last war of China? the modifications that are going to be produced in that country, for so long stagnant, the new physiological and psychological elements carried there? In a few centuries it will perhaps no longer be recognizable, compared to the Mexico of today, compared with that of the time of Columbus. As for the indigenous peoples of Mexico, we shall say, like Erastus, that there were in them customs more gentle than virtues, and we add that they have, surely, poeticized to excess their supposed age of gold. The history of the conquest teaches us that they waged war among themselves, which does not indicate a great respect for the rights of neighbors. Their age of gold was that of infancy; today they are in the enthusiasm of youth; later they will attain the age of manhood. If they do not yet possess the virtue of the wise, they have acquired the intelligence that will lead them to it, when they are matured by experience. But centuries are necessary for the education of peoples; it operates only by the transformation of their constitutive elements. Would France be what it is today without the conquest of the Romans? And would the barbarians have become civilized if they had not invaded Gaul? Gaulish wisdom and Roman civilization, united with the vigor of the peoples of the North, made the present French people. Without doubt it is painful to think that progress, at times, needs destruction. But it is necessary to destroy the old hovels and replace them with new houses, more beautiful and more comfortable. Moreover, it is necessary to take into account the backward state of the globe, where Humanity is only at material and intellectual progress. When it enters into that of moral and spiritual progress, the moral necessities will supplant the material necessities. Men will be governed according to justice and will no longer have to claim their place by force; then war and destruction will no longer have any reason to be. Until then, struggle is a consequence of their moral inferiority. Living more materially than spiritually, man considers things only from the present and material point of view; consequently, from a limited point. Until now, he has been ignorant that the capital role belongs to the Spirit; he has seen the effects, but he has not known the causes, which is why, for so long, he went astray in the sciences, in his institutions, and in his religions. Spiritism, by teaching him the participation of the spiritual element in all the things of the world, broadens his horizon and changes the course of his ideas; it opens the era of moral progress.