The Indian of the present time, undermined by alcohol and poverty, is free according to the law, but a serf by virtue of the permanance of authoritative manners. Petty tyrannies make him a slave; he {354} works for the _cacique_, the baron of American feudalism. The curé, the sub-prefect, and the judge, all-powerful in these young democracies, exploit him and despoil him of his possessions.[1] The communities, very like the Russian _mir_, are disappearing, and the Indian is losing his traditional rights to the lands of the collectivity. Without sufficient food, without hygiene, a distracted and laborious beast, he decays and perishes; to forget the misery of his daily lot he drinks, becomes an alcoholic, and his numerous progeny present the characteristics of degeneracy. He lives in the mountains or table-lands, where a glacial cold prevails and the solitude is eternal. Nothing disturbs the monotony of these desolate stretches; nothing breaks the inflexible line of the limitless horizons; there the Indian grows as melancholy and as desiccated as the desert that surrounds him. The great occasions of his civil life--birth, marriage, and death--are the subjects of a religious exploitation. Servile and superstitious, he finally loves the tyrannies that oppress him. He adores the familiar gods of the Cerros, of the mountain. He is at once a Christian and a fetish-worshipper; he sees in mysterious nature demons and goblins, occult powers which are favourable and hostile by turn. There are, nevertheless, regions where despotism has developed in the Indian a sort of passive resistance. There he is sober and vigorous, and by his complete adaptation to the maternal soil he has grown apathetic and a creature of routine. He hates all that might destroy his age-long traditions: schools, military training, and the authority that despoils him. Conservative and melancholy, he lives on the border of the Republic and its laws; his heart grows hot against the tyranny from which he forever suffers. Dissimulation, servility, and melancholy are {355} his leading traits; rancour, hardness, and hypocrisy are the forms of his defensive energy. He supports his slavery upon this cold earth, but he sometimes revolts against his exploiters; and at Huanta and Ayoayo he fought against his oppressors with true courage, sustained by hatred, as in the heroic times of _Tupac-Amaru_.[2] After this bloody epic he resumed his monotonous existence under the heedless sky. In his songs he curses his birth and his destiny. In the evening he leaves the narrow valley where in his slavery he is employed in agricultural labours, to journey into the _cerros_ and mourn the abandonment of his household gods. A weird lamentation passes over the darkening earth, and from summit to summit the Cordillera re-echoes the sorrowful and melodious plaint of the Indian as he curses conquest and warfare.