During the two hundred years which followed the Spanish conquest, life on the Bolivian plateau was vegetative and changeless except for the occasional excitement caused by the discovery of a rich new silver mine. The Indians lived in their villages, herding their masters' sheep or cultivating maize and potatoes, paid tribute to the encomenderos or the Crown collector, and submitted with dull patience to all the exactions. They reverenced their caciques, listened submissively to the parish priests, and meekly suffered the tyranny of the corregidors. The language of the conquerors was unintelligible to most of the people. When summoned to work in the mines they went to slow misery and certain death with the stoicism of their race. The South American Indian changes his attributes but slowly, and we find a moral resemblance in tribes differing widely in material culture. The Inca emperor exacted and received the same blind, unquestioning obedience which the Paraguayans gave to Lopez four centuries later, and the rude Guaranies on the banks of the Parana, who had hardly entered the stone age, were no more readily submissive to the Spaniards than the Quichuas of Bolivia, whose engineering, agriculture, and architecture had reached a high degree of development. Except the floating population of miners, the Spaniards and their descendants lived in the cities--La Paz, Cochabamba, Oruro, Charcas, Tarija, Santa Cruz. Each city had its plaza, its townhouse, its officials, and its law-courts. Administrative centres for the surrounding districts, their inhabitants were mainly functionaries and hangers-on, who varied the sleepy monotony of their existence by factional quarrels and political intrigues. In these cities the slow process of amalgamating the white and red races began, and the dynamic restlessness of the Caucasian infiltrated by degrees into the static calm of the Indian. The lower classes of the towns became half-breed, while in the country districts pure Indians predominated. Late in the colonial period the Spaniards were still occupying the position of alien taskmasters, and the process of fusing the different races into a homogeneous mass had made little progress after two centuries and a half of contact. In a word, the social and political organisation of Upper Peru was largely a continuation of the Inca system, but that system had been deformed and deprived of its efficiency and was subject to constant arbitrary interference from the Spanish corregidors, while the cities were separately governed by military governors and their own cabildos.