In Bolivia the tribute is still paid by men between the ages of eighteen and fifty: the amount being six to ten dollars a year for proprietors of land, and five dollars for strangers. The revenue from this source amounted, in 1850, to 4,595,000 dollars. But though the _mita_, the _reparto_, and the tribute have all been abolished by law in Peru, the deplorable civil wars, and the system of keeping up a large standing army, which is not only unnecessary, but most mischievous, have entailed much oppression on the Indians in the shape of impressment for the army. Villages are frequently surrounded by a party of soldiers, and all the able-bodied men that can be caught are driven away to serve in the ranks. This deplorable waste of human life is rapidly reducing the already scanty population; and the system is more oppressive and cruel because it is done in defiance of the law, by the military presidents and generals who have hitherto been able to set the laws enacted by civilians at defiance, when it suits their purpose.[278] Yet on the whole the condition of the Indians is immeasurably more endurable under the Republic than it was when they groaned under the _mitas_ of the Spanish corregidors. The history of these Peruvian Indians has been a very melancholy one. The early accounts which the Spanish chroniclers gave of the great empire of the Incas represented the Indians as a people ruled by laws and usages which provided for almost every action of their lives; neither a thief nor a vicious man was known amongst them; and they lived in happiness and contentment, but under a most rigid system of tutelage and subjection. Then came the Spanish conquerors, and, after a quarter of a century of bloodshed and rapine, the people found themselves bowed down by a grievous yoke. While the most beneficent laws were enacted by the Council of the Indies, their humane provisions continued to be either entirely evaded, or converted into pretexts for additional modes of oppression. From upwards of thirty millions the population was reduced to three millions within the space of two centuries; and all that can be said of the much-lauded colonial legislation of Spain is that it prevented the Indians from being actually exterminated; and that, when Peru gained her independence, there were a few million survivors, scattered in villages at wide intervals over a region once thickly peopled by their ancestors. The Council-room at Seville was, like another place, thickly paved with good intentions.