To defray the expense of these public entertainments, the major-domos have in most instances not only to spend all their savings, but to borrow, and to run up their credit with the sellers of fruit and preserves, the butcher, the baker, the distiller, and _chicheras_, or women that make the country beer, and sell the malt, called _jorra_, made of maize. In short, a major-domo of a festival in a village of any consideration gets well off if one hundred and fifty or two or three hundred dollars, pay his share of the anniversary feast and procession. To sustain the pageantry of one day of drunken and profligate religious enthusiasm in honour of a favourite saint, these men foolishly entangle themselves and families in the miseries of debt and embarrassments that destroy both ease and independence, and lead to a multitude of evils naturally arising out of such degraded circumstances. We have ourselves employed in weeding our cane-fields an honest and industrious family thus reduced to great privation; from which the children could never expect to emerge, after the death of an industrious father, except by the utmost prudence, perseverance, and industry on their own part, and friendly support on the part of their employer. To conclude these remarks on the Indian’s condition, we have shown that evil example in high places, religious abuses, the exactions of the collector of revenue, and also of the priest, (whom, by the by, the state should deliver from this degrading necessity, by giving him an adequate income out of the tithes which it has appropriated to itself,) the arbitrariness of petty governors, alcaldes, and village captains, together with the restless and overweening ambition of military despots that allow their country no repose,—we have shown that these causes, collectively, tend to render the Indian race—which forms the bulk of the Peruvian nation—insecure in their persons and property, distrustful and cringing in their character, degraded in their morals, and heirs direct to civil and religious bondage. The curates who reside in the mountain glens and deep corries feel assured, from the well-known feelings cherished by their flocks, that when the day arrives when these uneducated men of the hills shall understand what are their own political rights and physical strength, and shall be commanded by bold and sagacious leaders of their own blood and kind, they will fearfully and cruelly avenge their wrongs on all “advenedizos,” all exotics!—on their white oppressors and sable interlopers![26] CHAPTER VI.