The family of the Incas, whose scourge Pizarro proved to be, must have numbered many fine politicians in its ranks. Never has what is called a "dynastic policy" been pursued more methodically and ably. The proofs assail us at every moment. The Incas were a family of priest-kings, who reigned, as children of the Sun, over the Peruvian land, and the Sun himself was the great deity of the country. To obey the Incas was to obey the supreme god. Their person was the object of a veritable cultus, and they had succeeded so completely in identifying the interests of their own family with those of religion, of politics and of civilization, that it was no longer possible to distinguish them one from another. And yet it was this very method, so essentially theocratic, of insisting on the minute regulation of all the actions of human life in the name of religion, which finally ruined the Incas. Peru, in the sixteenth century, had become one enormous convent, in which everything was mechanically regulated, in which no one could take the smallest initiative, in which everything depended absolutely upon the will of the reigning Inca; so that the moment Pizarro succeeded in laying hold of this Inca, this "father Abbé," everything collapsed in a moment, and nothing was left of the edifice constructed with such sagacity but a heap of sand. And indeed this is the fatal result of every theocracy, for it can never really be anything but a _hierocracy_ or rule of priests. On the one hand it must be absolute, for the sovereign priest rules in the name of God; and on the other hand it is fatally impelled to concern itself with every minutest affair, to interfere vexatiously in all private concerns (since they too affect religious ethics and discipline), and to multiply regulations against every possible breach of the ruling religion. It is a general lesson of religious history that is illustrated so forcibly by the fate of the Inca priest-kings.