culture or to easy intercommunication and comfortable living, for along the sandy coast it rarely rained, and but scanty streams fed the earth, and it was hemmed in all along by colossal mountains from three to four miles high whose solemn and forbidding grandeur seemed to cast a sort of deterrent shadow over the aspirations and attempted improvements of man.

The steeps of these sierras with their frowning giant faces of naked porphyry and granite, the frightful precipices, furious torrents, and gorges of impenetrable gloom that abound in these regions, at times struck terror or at least dismay into the stout hearts of the invading Europeans. But they found, as they advanced, that the art of man had conquered the stubborn heart of nature in a way that filled them with wonder; for Europe at that time presented no equal spectacle or even hint of such superb triumphs of mind over matter as the Government of Peru had achieved for its people.

The naturally barren coast was fertilized by a system of canals and underground aqueducts. Many of the most imposing mountains were terraced up to their snowy plateaus with gardens in which the fruits and vegetables of various zones were raised, and amid these orchards and gardens at many points towns and hamlets were seen clinging to the mountain sides so high above the average track of the clouds as to delude at first, when the dawn disclosed them to the beauty-loving eyes of the Spaniard, with the physical fancy that these villages were suspended in mid-air and might vanish, like dreams, at the voice of the breeze of morning.

Above these towns nestling so confidingly on the breasts of the giant mountains, were snowy plains that rose gradually towards the peaks, and over these white deserts of the sky wandered innumerable flocks of llamas, the Peruvian sheep, from whose wool the government clothed the people. And across chasms, from the like of which, when they traversed the empire's borders, the Spaniards had shrunk back almost with horror as from living pictures of the abysses of that hell with which their religion threatened them, across ravines whose dark, dizzying depths tempted such as gaze too long to plunge into annihilation, — across wide gorges where tumultuous torrents chanted mad litanies

of liberty or seemed like the rude flashing laughters of the Titan mountains, laughters at the pygmy, Man, who had dared attempt to utilize their forces, across these divisions of uncooperant and defiant nature the genius of the Peruvian had swung suspension bridges, binding precipice to steep and hill to hill with rope-roads made from the fibres of the maguey.

These ropes were twisted into cables the size of a man's body, and fitted into holes in immense pillars of solid rock carved out of the opposite faces of the cliffs. They were cross-pieced with wood and other smaller ropes, and the sides were protected by a sufficiently high railing. Of course, there was some elasticity to bridges made of such material, and their oscillations under the passage of troops were at first frightful and sea-sickish to the Spaniards. But these bridges, in their size, frequency, and stability, together with the great smooth stone roads traversing the moun

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tain passes and connecting the capital, Cuzco, with the remotest villages of the empire, never ceased to excite the admiration of the conquerors. These roads have been suffered now to fall from disrepair into decay, and mostly into disappearance. But the fragmentary stretches that remain attest their pristine massiveness, and the great traveller and philosopher, Humboldt, always sparing in his praise, ranks them among the most useful and stupendous works ever executed by man.1

2

Let us glance at the chief capital of ancient Peru, the city of Cuzco, the heart of the empire in which centred all the roads like the arms of the government. Peru was not the name of the empire, but was given by the Spaniards in mistake. The natives with pardonable pride called their country Tavántinsúyu, or the Four Quarters of the World, and, as if in token of the truth thereof, from the great city of Cuzco where hundreds of thousands lived happily, with no want, no poverty, and but little disease, rayed forth four great roads to the four points of the compass, and the four provinces of the empire.

Cuzco, too, was divided into four quarters, and the various races that gathered there lived each in the quarter nearest its own province, and each by law wore the general costume of the province, modified of course in some measure by individual taste, but never so much as to hide the place or the rank to which they belonged.

The capital was thus a miniature of the empire. Each of these provinces was ruled by a viceroy, or royal deputy, and a council, and these viceroys not only sent continual reports to the sovereign or Inca residing in Cuzco of the condition of the people, the weather, crops, etc., but a certain part of every year they convened in Cuzco to pay their respects to the Inca, and listen to his plans for the improvement or extension of the empire, thus forming a sort of Cabinet to the Crown.

The decimal system invented by the French and adopted by all scientists was used by the Incas of Peru in their government with remarkable results. Such things as the finding of an unknown

1 Le grand chemin de l'Inca était un des ouvrages les plus utiles et en meme temps des plus gigantesques que les hommes aient exécuté.-Humboldt.

"It was situated about the middle of present Peru.

dead body, or a mysterious disappearance which we so often read of in our newspapers was an impossibility in Peru, for every person was numbered, not in the sense of having a tag, but in the sense of that Scriptural passage which informs us that in the eyes of a truly paternal deity every hair of our heads is numbered. So in Peru, there was no one so insignificant as not to receive the attention of the government.

The nation at large was divided into decades, or tens, and every tenth man was an officer, or high servant of the rest, his duty

being to see that they enjoyed all their rights, to solicit aid for them from the government when necessary, and to bring offenders to justice. Justice, so often a bitter jest with us, was a reality in Peru, for in case of neglect the judge had to pay the penalty of the guilty, and he had only five days to decide cases.

These decades were grouped in fives, tens, and hundreds, up to ten thousand, each head of a decade being under the supervision of a man representing five decades sometimes, but generally ten; or in other words each hundred men had nine special officers and one general captain, each thousand men the same, every captain of one grade being a subordinate of the next higher till ten thou

sand was reached. The whole empire was arranged in departments of ten thousand with a special governor appointed from the Inca nobility.

Under this system authority was so subdivided and graduated, and had so many mathematical checks on it that individual oppression or domination was almost impossible. Officialism or bureaucracy was prevented from being an evil by making it all-pervasive.

Not only was every man accounted for from his birth to his death, but he felt that he counted in the vast sum of serene happiness which radiated from the sacred person of the Inca, who was at once the hereditary high priest of the national religion, and the loving manager of his people's material affairs, watching over the minutest concerns of their daily lives. This was not felt to be, as some administrations in France have been, a vast system of espionage, but a sympathy of the great man with his children that was tireless and almost sleepless.

The Peruvian felt always a line of communication vibrating from himself to his sovereign, for although there were no courts of appeal, and the few laws were very severe, the rights of the individual were safeguarded by a committee of visitors which at certain periods perambulated the kingdom, investigating the character and conduct of the magistrates, and punishing in a summary way any judicial errors or delinquencies. Nor this alone, for the lower courts had to make monthly reports of all cases to the higher, and these to the viceroy, so that the Inca seated at Cuzco could review, reach out and rectify any abuses.

There being no money in Peru, few laws were needed, and crime was rather a rarity, and at the time of the invasion was probably becoming rarer, because death was the penalty of the most grave violations of law, and criminals were thus prevented from perpetuating themselves.

The crimes of theft and murder were capital, and so was a breach of the marital vow, though it was justly provided that extenuating circumstances might be taken into consideration by the judges to soften the sentence. Blasphemy against the Sun or against the Sovereign, an exceedingly rare offence, and burning a bridge were death.