Doubtless there were zealous officials both civil and religious who performed the best type of service. The Spaniards were established amidst a native population, who devoted themselves to commerce or to mining in the north, and to the raising of cattle and lesser trades in the river and central districts, and they always looked upon their residence in this part of American territory as a temporary sojourn, during which to acquire riches. The creoles, of every class, both of the city and of the country, perhaps because they seemed to be looked down upon by the Spaniards, were unconsciously trying to enlarge their hold upon affairs of all kinds. They felt themselves, as it were, rooted to the soil, and far from proceeding only from selfish motives of money making, they took an interest in local affairs, which, for them, were of greater importance than those of a crown, only vaguely known to them by report. The city creoles, thanks to an advanced communal spirit, aroused by the establishment of the _cabildos_ or Spanish town council, were diligently at work on their own municipal problems. They thus became accustomed to limit their horizon to the limits of their own city and of the immediately surrounding country district, because communication between the cities was slow, difficult and dangerous, a condition which resulted in their virtual isolation from each other. The city might almost be regarded as the center of their universe. From the rest of the world news arrived months and years later, tempered or misrepresented. It awakened not the faintest echo. It might as well have been the news of far away ages and peoples. The mass of the natives, with whose women the military and civil population cohabited, since relatively few Spanish women came to America, took no interest whatsoever in the affairs of a monarchy which was not that of their ancestors but of a race different from themselves. They showed, rather, such a passive indifference that each community seemed a world unto itself, occupied and pre-occupied only with its own matters. The religious and civil officials, in their turn, were soon contaminated by this environment. They gave to local affairs so excessive an importance that it also appeared to their eyes as if the boundary of the Indian city was the _ultima Thule_ of civilization. In the northern provinces, which had reached the final stage of perfection under the old Inca conquest, the native population preserved and protected its pre-Columbian traditions by the use of their dialect, the _quichua_ tongue. The régime of the _encomienda_, the _mitas_ and the _yanaconazgo_ had produced only a formal subjection of the natives. In the depths of their souls the natives preserved and fostered traditions of bygone centuries. In this way the creoles, the product of interbreeding, were recast into the dense mass of the Indian population and became more conversant with American traditions than Spanish.