magnanimous Montezuma?

Indians believed in witches, and burned them, too. And did not the
sainted Baxter, with the Bible in his hand, pronounce it right, and was
not the Indian permitted to be present, when the quiet unoffending woman
was cast into the fire, by the decree of a Puritan council?

To come down to the more decidedly Christian times, it is not so very
long since, in Protestant England, hanging was the punishment of a petty
thief, long and hopeless imprisonment of a slight misdemeanor, when men
were set up to be stoned and spit upon by those who claimed the exclusive
right to be called humane and merciful.

Again, it is said, the Indian mode of warfare is, without exception, the
most inhuman and revolting. But I do not know that those who die by the
barbed and poisoned arrow linger in any more unendurable torment than
those who are mangled with powder and lead balls, and the custom of
scalping among Christian murderers would save thousands from groaning
days, and perhaps weeks, among heaps that cover victorious fields and
fill hospitals with the wounded and dying. But scalping is not an
invention exclusively Indian. "It claims," says Prescott, "high
authority, or, at least, antiquity." And, further history, Herodotus,
gives an account of it among the Scythians, showing that they performed
the operation, and wore the scalp of their enemies taken in battle, as
trophies, in the same manner as the North American Indian. Traces of the
custom are also found in the laws of the Visigaths, among the Franks, and
even the Anglo Saxons. The Northern Indians did not scalp, but they had a
system of slavery, of which there are no traces to be found among the
customs, laws, or legends of the Iroquois.