The numerous body of officials charged with the general superintendence and direction of affairs was organized in a very remarkable manner, well calculated to consolidate the Inca's power. All the officials held their authority from him, and represented him to the people, just as he himself represented the Sun-god. At the bottom of the scale was an official overseer for every ten families, next above an overseer of a hundred families, then another placed over a thousand, and another over ten thousand. Each province had a governor who generally belonged to the family of the Incas. All this constituted a marvellous system of surveillance and espionage, descending from the sovereign himself to the meanest of his subjects, and founded on the principle that the rays of the Sun pierce everywhere. The lowest members of this official hierarchy, the superintendents of ten families, were responsible to their immediate superiors for all that went on amongst those under their charge, and those superiors again were responsible to the next above them, and so on up to the Inca himself, who thus held the threads of the whole vast net-work in the depths of his palace. It was another maxim of the Peruvian state that every one must work, even old men and children. Infants under five alone were excepted. It was the duty of the superintendents of ten families to see that this was carried out everywhere, and they were armed with disciplinary powers to chastise severely any one who remained idle, or who ordered his house ill, or gave rise to any scandal. Individual liberty then was closely restrained. No one could leave his place of residence without leave. The time for marriage was fixed for both sexes--for women at eighteen to twenty, for men at twenty-four or upwards. The unions of the noble families were arranged by the Inca himself, and those of the inferior classes by his officers, who officially assigned the young people one to another. Each province had its own costume, which might not be changed for any other, and every one's birthplace was marked by a ribbon of a certain colour surrounding his head.[43] In a word, the Jesuits appear to have copied the constitution of the Peruvian society when they organized their famous Paraguay missions, and perhaps this fact may help us to trace the profound motives which in either case suggested so minutely precise a system of inserting individuals into assigned places which left no room for self-direction. The Incas and the Jesuits alike had to contend against the disconnected, incoherent turbulence of savage life, and both alike were thereby thrown upon an exaggerated system of regulations, in which each individual was swaddled and meshed in supervisions and ordinances from which it was impossible to escape.