The most remarkable fact about the maltreatment of the South American Indians is that--admitted and specially alluded to in the Peruvian Press, as the foregoing extracts show--abuses are carried out often by the petty authorities themselves. It is painful for a foreigner, one, moreover, who has enjoyed hospitality both from the authorities and from the village priests in the interior of Peru, to record these matters, but it is manifestly a duty. Moreover, it is a service to the country itself to draw attention to the evil. The extinction of the indigenous labour of the Andine highlands and of the rubber forests will render impossible for a long period the internal development of the country. No foreign or imported race can perform the work of the Peruvian miner or rubber-gatherer. Due to the peculiar conditions of climate--the great altitude in the one case and the humidity in the other--no European or Asiatic people could take the place of these people, whose work can only be accomplished by those who have paid Nature the homage of being born upon the soil and inured to its conditions throughout many generations.[12] It might have been supposed that from economic reasons alone the exploiters of native labour would have endeavoured to foster and preserve it, even if it were simply on the principle of feeding and stabling a horse in order to use its powers to the utmost. But this is not the case. The economic principle of conserving the efficiency of human labour by its employer, remarkable as it may seem, has never been recognised even in the most enlightened communities, or only very recently and in a very few instances. It is not necessary to go to the tropics to seek instances; they are evident no farther afield than among the ill-paid mining, dock, manufacturing, and other labour in Great Britain and the United States. The very abundance of labour has been its own undoing; the supply has seemed exhaustless and the tendency has been to squander it. The question is one of degree rather than of principle in any community or industry and at any time in history. But in the persecuted districts of Latin America native labour is practically being hounded off the face of the earth.