Never was there a greater mistake: their skill in carving and all carpenter's work, in painting and embroidery, the exquisite fabrics they weave from vicuña-wool, the really touching poetry of their love-songs and _yaravis_, the traditional histories of their _ayllus_, which they preserve with religious care, surely disprove so false a charge. The houses in Sandia are the merest barns, with mud-walls, and roofs which let the water in. All the family sleep together in a promiscuous way; pigs and fowls wandering over the floor at early dawn. The Juez de Paz, Francisco Farfan, administers justice in such a place as this, lounging on a sort of mud-platform at one end of the room, where his bed is made up, while the culprit, and a crowd of alcaldes and spectators, stand before him. Every one chatters at the same time for about ten minutes, and the prisoner is sent to the lock-up. The Jueces de Paz have to render periodical accounts of all their cases, attested by witnesses, to the Juez de Primera Instancia in the capital of the province. While upon the subject of these local authorities, it will be well to give an account of the powers placed in their hands by the Constitution of 1856, by which Peru is now governed; both because the measures then adopted will, I believe, have a lasting and beneficial effect on the people, and because the persons so vested with power endeavoured to display their patriotic zeal by throwing obstacles in my way. By this constitution it was provided that in the capital of each department there should be a _Junta Departmental_,[310] the members of which should be elected in the same way and with the same qualifications as those for the National Congress, to meet every year. These _Juntas_ were to deliberate and legislate for the advancement and material progress of the departments, their decrees being null if contrary to any law of Congress. The evident objection to this measure is its tendency to split the country up into small communities with separate interests, which has always proved to be most disastrous in thinly-peopled and half-civilized states. This view is taken in a very able article on the constitution, in a periodical published at Lima, where the _Juntas Departmentales_ are declared to be the initiation of a system of "federation," the result of which has always been to dismember countries into so many small depopulated districts, as in Mexico, Central America, New Granada, and the Argentine Republic, introducing civil war, anarchy, and dissolution. The writer might now add the dis-United States of North America also.[311]