“The labour of the obraje, or manufactory, begins before the day dawns, at which time every Indian takes his place at the piece which is in process of weaving and the tasks of the day are distributed as may be expedient; and when this process is concluded, the owner of the house closes the door, and leaves them immured as in a prison. At midday the door is opened for the women to go in with their scanty allowance of food, which is soon partaken, and they are again locked in. When the darkness of the night no longer permits them to work, the owner goes round to gather up the stints; those who have not been able to finish, in spite of apologies or reasonings, are punished with indescribable cruelty: and those unfeeling men, as if transformed into merciless savages, inflict upon the wretched Indians lashes by the hundred, for they use no other method of counting; and to complete the punishment, they remand them again to the workshop: and although the whole building is a prison-house, a portion of it is reserved for fetters and instruments of torture, where they are punished with greater indignity than could be practised towards the most delinquent slaves.... “We frequently met the Indians on the highway, tied by the hair to the tail of a horse, on which a mestizo is mounted, who is conveying them to the workshops, and perhaps for the trivial offence of having evaded the tyranny of the overseer, from fear of punishment. Let what will be said of the cruelty practised by the patrons (encomenderos) towards the Indians at the commencement of the conquest, we cannot persuade ourselves, after what we have witnessed, that it could ever have been carried to the extent it now is by the Spaniards and mestizos.” (pp. 276, 279.) Some paragraphs of the _Noticias secretas_ refer to the immorality of the clergy: [Sidenote: Corruption of the clergy] “The persons who compose the two orders of the clergy are guilty of such licentiousness, that making due allowance for the frailties to which human nature is liable and the weakness to which men of every class are subject, it would appear that those ecclesiastics regard it as their peculiar privilege to go before all others in the career of vice; for while they are under the most sacred obligations not only to practise virtue, but to correct the errors incident to frail nature, it is they who, by their pernicious example, sanction the practice of iniquity, and in a measure divest it of its heinous nature.