The cruelty innate in the Spanish race has been shown in their mining methods, and the native population of Mexico, and in a larger scale of Peru, suffered severely at their hands. Guanajuato, one of the most famous and richest of the mining centres of Mexico--in past times as to-day--bears in its archives the stories of oppression which marked the methods of the Spaniards, and may be taken as a concrete example. It was a system of slavery under which these mines were worked--an atrocious system of forced labour which took no heed of Indian life, save as it might most cheaply extract a given quantity of gold or silver ore from the pits and adits beneath the ground. Thousands of _peones_ were impressed into this forced labour; armed soldiers were stationed at the entrances of these labyrinths to see that each wretched serf deposited his sack of rock, under the load of which he had toiled up fathoms of notched pole, or ladder, from the infernal regions below, panting, sweating, expiring, and presently driven down again by the brutal taskmasters, jealous lest he might enjoy too much of the light of day and so sacrifice some moments in the delving amid the rocks which furnished the wealth. In 1619, a law was promulgated in Guanajuato--it remains upon the archives to this day--prohibiting the branding of slaves upon the face! But these inhuman methods brought about their own punishment. The great Valenciana mine, opened in 1760, which for fifty years was worked at a sacrifice of human life by these methods, producing more than 300 million dollars, became at last the scene of a terrible vengeance, for the serfs rose in rebellion and massacred every white man upon the place. Indeed, the brutalities practised by the Spanish mine-owners largely influenced the revolution and secession from the mother country. For more than three centuries there flowed from the mines of Mexico and Peru, millions and millions of silver and gold, which went to fill the needy coffers of Spain, to enrich a distant and callous or careless monarch, and to prop up a moribund nation. The appalling system of the _mitad_ and the _encomenderos_, by which silver and gold were extracted with indecent haste, form such pages as can never be erased from the history of metallurgy in the New World.