The mystery of thy making was revealed. ples-this myth, however more than usually be judged, (and we can hardly be sure that we out the whole American continent. But in Mr. "The deity whose worship the Peruvians especially inculcated, and which they never failed to establish wherever their banners were known to penetrate, was the sun. It was he who, in a man; gave light and warmth to the nations, and particular manner, presided over the destinies of life to the vegetable world; whom they reverenced as the father of their royal dynasty, the founder of their empire; and whose temples rose in every city and almost every village throughout the land, while his altars smoked with burnt offerings-a form of civilized nations of the New World.'-Vol. i., p. 85. sacrifice peculiar to the Peruvians among the semi "The fiction of Manco Capac and his sister wife was devised, no doubt, at a later period, to gratify the vanity of the Peruvian monarchs, and to give additional sanction to their authority by deriving it from a celestial origin." So writes Mr. Prescott. The philosophy of these myths we must for the present leave to Mr. Grote: but this is only another instance of the same universal tendency of man either himself to deify his legislators, or acquiesce in their assumption of deity. All royal races culminate in gods-that, is in the Unknown. The line of the incas, where it ceases to be traceable further upward, (and Peruvian history aspired not beyond a dynasty of thirteen princes,) terminates in the Great God. This god among the Peruvians was the Sun, as among the Greeks it was Jupiter, among the Romans Mars. It is not so much (here we fully enter into the justice of the more modern theory on this subject) the deliberate invention of vanity, or the artful We dwell on this because it appears to us, indesign of strengthening the theocratic power of stead of being in favor (as it might at first be the kings, as the universal religious sentiment, thought) of an Asiatic origin of Peruvian civilizawhich makes the gods the parents of sovereigns tion, rather to make strongly against it. and founders of dynasties. But, neither in Eastern where, we believe, in Eastern Asia, was the worAsia, in the Tartar kingdoms, in Thibet, nor un- ship of the sun the great dominant, almost excluder the later Caliphate in the West, does the sive, religion. Everywhere religious festivals theocracy, which claims indefeasible and absolute sovereignty for the lineal descendant of the gods, appear in a form so undisguised and imperious as it did in Peru. The inca was the living son and representative of God-almost God upon earth. No followed the course of the sun; everywhere he received adoration, in some form, either as the representative of light, as the emblem of the generative principle, or as the sun-god, in the various splendid shapes which he assumed in It is remarkable, that the worship of the sun, Grecian anthropomorphism; but nowhere, unless that primitive and noblest of idolatries, seems to among the primeval Tsabians, if among them, have maintained a more complete and absolute was the orb of day itself the supreme, all-ruling dominance in Peru than in any other part of the deity. But all the great temples of Peru were world. Byron's splendid invocation, which he dedicated to him-if not alone, as of supreme places in the mouth of Manfred, is mythologically dignity-the sacred virgins were virgins of the sun-he was the father of the royal race. true : As 1 we shall see hereafter, Atahualpa, in his first interview with the Spaniards, when Valverde summoned him to believe in the Holy Trinity, appealed from the historic god, on whose crucifixion the friar had enlarged, to his visible God, whose descent was brightening the western heavens. The Great Temple of the Sun is thus described by Mr. Prescott : "The most renowned of the Peruvian temples, the pride of the capital, and the wonder of the empire, was at Cuzco, where, under the munificence of successive sovereigns, it had become so enriched, that it received the name of Coricancha, or the Place of Gold.' It consisted of a principal building and several chapels and inferior edifices, cover ing a large extent of ground in the heart of the city, and completely encompassed by a wall, which, with the edifices, was all constructed of stone. A Spaniard, who saw it in its glory, assures us he could call to mind only two edifices in Spain which, for their workmanship, were at all to be compared with it. Yet this substantial, and in some respects magnificent, structure was thatched with straw! will venture to add, of a gentle and beneficent supreme deity, is the more remarkable in a region which even then, no doubt, was rocked by the terrible earthquake, and which might behold the volcanoes of the Andes in all their cloud-capt and fire-evolving majesty. 66 The divinity which, even in European opinion, was supposed to hedge a king," rose up like a lofty and impregnable wall around the inca of Peru. "Even the proudest of the inca nobility, claiming a descent from the same divine original as himself, could not venture into the royal presence except barefoot-this sign of reverence, which reminds us of the Old Testament, and which is so universal in the East, prevailed throughout Peruvian usage-and bearing a light burden on his shoulders in token of homage." He was at once the sole legislative and executive power; he commanded the armies; his word was law. In the rugged but expressive words of an old Spanish writer, whom Mr. Prescott, according to his usage, has discarded into his notes, as out "The interior was literally a mine of gold. On of harmony with his smoother text—“ If he would the western wall was emblazoned a representation kill a hundred thousand Indians, there was no one of the deity, consisting of a human countenance in the kingdom who dared to say he should not do looking forth from amidst innumerable rays of light it." us. which emanated from it in every direction, in the The inca maintained, in some respects, the sesame manner as the sun is often personified with cluded state of an Oriental despot; in others he The figure was engraved on a massive plate was the accessible sovereign of his people. His of gold, of enormous dimensions, thickly powdered | with emeralds and precious stones. It was so situ-royal progress, which took place at intervals ated in front of the great eastern portal, that the throughout the realm, and was conducted with a rays of the morning sun fell directly upon it at its magnificence which taxes the gorgeous language rising, lighting up the whole apartment with an of Mr. Prescott to describe, was likewise that of a effulgence that seemed more than natural, and which feudal sovereign holding his courts of justice, in was reflected back from the golden ornaments with which he, the sole judge of appeal, received all which the walls and ceiling were everywhere in crusted. Gold, in the figurative language of the petitions for redress of grievances, and all compeople, was the tears wept by the sun,' and plaints against the regular tribunals. The royal every part of the interior of the temple glowed with burnished plates and studs of the precious metal. The cornices which surrounded the walls of the sanctuary were of the same costly material; and a broad belt or freize of gold, let into the stone work, encompassed the whole exterior of the edifice."Vol. i., p. 88-90. The Peruvian worship seems in the main to have been that of a mild and benificent deity. Human sacrifices, instead of being heaped up in remorseless hecatombs, and commemorated by awful piles of skulls, as in the great Mexican Temple, were rare, and of one single victim. As Livy, in his reverence for the Roman name, says that such sacrifices were 66 palanquin, it is said, was borne in turn by a thousand nobles, who were honored by this service. "Tradition long commemorated the spots at which he halted; and the simple people of the country held them in reverence as places consecrated by the presence of an inca."-(p. 25.) The inca must be born of the purest royal or rather divine race. As with the Egyptian kings, the wife of the inca was his sister; no one more remote was worthy of giving an heir to the elder lineage of the sun. The heir was made over to the care of the wise men, and exposed to the rigors of a kind of Spartan discipline, hard fare, athletic exercises, mimic combat. But on the non Romani moris;" throne he had not merely the pomp and power, he so Garcilasso de la Vega would absolve his royal had all the voluptuousness of the oriental despot. ancestors altogether from this bloody idolatry. The coya, or queen, had the dignity, but not more Mr. Prescott cites all the earlier Spanish authorities than the dignity, of a royal consort. King Soloas witnesses of this custom in Peru; if Garcilasso mon, or the most splendid sultan in Bagdad, in was disposed to soften off everything discreditable Delhi, or in Constantinople, had not a more to the inca rule, so the Spaniards might be in- crowded harem, more luxurious gardens, more clined to receive but scanty evidence to darken green and crystal-watered groves, certainly not the heathen superstitions of the conquered race; such lavish prodigality of gold and silver ornabut we incline to believe that Mr. Prescott comes ments, as the residence of the inca in the favorite to the right conclusion-and that this exceptional valley of Yucay. Among his chief privileges was feature lingered amidst the otherwise mild system the selection of as many subordinate wives as he of the Peruvians. Their general conception, we pleased from among the Virgins of the Sun. This monastic institution of the "Brides of the | manufacturer, the one great poor-law commissioner, Sun" is but another illustration of the universality or rather poor-law guardian-Mr. Chadwick himof the religious sentiment, and the form which it self could not have wished to have matters more takes at certain phases of human society. The his own way. There was first a triple division of Vestals of Rome, and of some of the earlier Asi- the land. "The whole territory was divided into atic religions, the Budhist monasteries, the nunner- three parts, one for the sun, another for the inca, ies of the Roman Catholic world, find their anti-and the last for the people." Wherever royal types in Peru. In two remarkable particulars the prowess added a new province to the empire, this Virgin of the Sun bore a curious resemblance to triple division, like that of the Gothic conquerors the Vestal of Rome: her duty was to watch a in Europe, became the law; but the proportion sacred fire; the punishment of unchastity was to varied according to the amount of population, and be buried alive. "Her lover, indeed, in Peru, was the greater or less amount of land consequently not merely an object of religious horror, he was to required for the support of the inhabitants.. The be strangled, the town or village in which he lived lands of the sun were the church lands, and proto be razed to the ground, and sowed with stones," vided for the solemnities of public worship; the so as to efface the memory of his existence. In all share of the inca was the royal domain, which furother respects (excepting the royal privilege of the nished the civil list of the monarch and his royal incas) chastity was maintained with the most jeal-house; the third was assigned to the people. This ous rigor, though without that austere and ascetic last property, if we are to believe our authorities, discipline which has been thought in other reli- was resumed and repartitioned at the close of every gious systems its only safe guardian. Though year. Every Peruvian was bound to marry at a these maidens were jealously secluded from the certain period; the all-pervading state chose him conversation of men, (no one but the inca and his a wife; on his marriage he received a portion of queen might enter the sacred precincts,) their land sufficient for his maintenance, which was indwellings were sumptuous and richly furnished, creased upon the birth of each child, "the amount the vessels and utensils of gold and silver. Yet for a son being double that of a daughter;" but it might seem that the whole property of the god, the new annual distribution cut off this allowance, including this fair bevy of attendants, was the in case of the diminution of the family. The property of the inca. One great establishment in curacas, the aristocracy, only received a larger Cuzco, which is said to have contained fifteen proportion in consideration of their dignity. But hundred virgins of the royal blood of the incas, the state was not merely the proprietor of the land, undefiled with any baser admixture, under the care it was the proprietor of the labor of the people. of aged matrons, all instructed in weaving fine The three divisions of the land were cultivated by wool for the services of the temple, and in other the people, in regular succession. First, that of such works for the use of the incas-was likewise the church-then, by a provision which, in its a nursery for the royal seraglio. The most beau-spirit, reminds us of some of the gentler ordinances tiful were chosen for this honor; and if the king of the Mosaic law, that of the impotent poor, the at any time was disposed to lessen the number of old, the widow, and the orphan, and that of solhis establishment, the discarded lady did not re-diers employed in the service of the state. The turn to her convent, but to her family home, where she was an object of profound reverence to the people, as having been the concubine of the inca. people next worked each his own plot of ground, but with a general obligation to mutual assistance when any circumstance the burden of a young and numerous family, for example-might demand it. Mr. Prescott quotes from Garcilasso de la Vega the case of an Indian being hanged for tilling the land of a great man, a curaca, one of his own kindred, before that of the poor. "Lastly, they cultivated the lands of the inca. This was done with great ceremony by the whole population in a body. At break of day, they were The death of the inca alone seemed to darken into the most awful cruelty the character of this gentle people-his honor must be maintained in the grave; nothing which had been privileged by his intimate use must be desecrated after his departure. The great Tartar practice of burying treasures or implements of war, and of immolating on the grave of the chieftain all his menial attend-summoned together by proclamation from some ants, was adopted in Peru; while the suttees on the banks of the Ganges might have beheld with jealousy the hundreds of concubines who eagerly achieved" conjugal martyrdom." neighboring tower or eminence, and all the inhabitants of the district-men, women, and children-appeared dressed in their gayest apparel, bedecked with their little store of finery and ornaments, as if for some great jubilee. They went through the The government was an absolute despotism, but labors of the day with the same joyous spirit, chanta despotism which condescended to parental care ing their popular ballads, which commemorated the over the whole people. Never has centralization heroic deeds of the incas, regulating their movebeen carried to such an extent; never did the ad-ments by the measure of the chant, and all mingling ministration so completely rule the destinies, pre-umph,' was usually the burden. These national in the chorus, of which the word hailli, or triscribe the occupations, regulate the labor, provide airs had something soft and pleasing in their charfor and allot the subsistence of the whole commu-acter, that recommended them to the Spaniards; nity, as in Peru. The state was, in one sense, and many a Peruvian song was set to music by them the proprietor of the whole soil, the farmer, the after the Conquest, and was listened to by the on fortunate natives with melancholy satisfaction, as it called up recollections of the past, when their days glided peacefully away under the sceptre of the incas."-p. 47. Garcilasso assigns a magnanimous motive for this postponement of the cultivation of the royal lands :-" The inca always preferred the tillage of his subjects before his own, it being their sure maxim, that the happiness of the prince depends on the prosperity of the people, without which they become unable to serve him either in times of war or peace." (Rycaut's Translation, p. 133.) limited power of flogging the lazy and stubborn into industry and obedience. How far this instrument of authority differed in weight and sharpness from that of the modern slave-driver does not transpire. Yet the law, and usage more powerful than law, especially in the mines, regulated the succession of labor with such provident care that none were worked beyond their strength, or their equitable proportion. The state assumed the full right to enact ten hours' bills, and such humane provisions. A stange, unprecedented, unparalleled Utopia! -where lands were improved to the highest state of productiveness, without the incitement of individual property in those lands, or in the produce of individual labor; where no one could improve his condition, yet contributed cheerfully, or under moderate compulsion, his full share of industry to the public stock; where free labor seems to have discharged the duty of slave labor; where great public granaries, in which large portions of the produce were laid up, while they anticipated the pressure of adverse seasons, and relieved the land from any apprehension of famine, in no way, like The state was likewise the great manufacturer, or rather superintendent of the one universal domestic manufacture. All the vast flocks of llamas which wandered over the Sierras were the property of the incas. The care with which their breeding and management were conducted, excited the astonishment of the Spaniards. The wool was laid up in public stores, and then distributed to the people, who were compelled (down to the women and children) to spin, and make their own clothes. The mines were likewise royalties. The miners and the artisans were all under the same official the largesses and distributions in Rome, encourcontrol, obliged to furnish a certain quota of labor to the public service. All occupations were strictly hereditary; each followed the art or profession of his father. Everything was done by command and by the sound of the trumpet. Every work was assigned by the overseer, who watched over its careful fulfilment, from the manuring and tilling of the soil by the able-bodied in the fields, to the spinning of the women and children in the private chamber. Public authority thus ruled the whole course of Peruvian life. A regular system of registration, and a periodical survey of the whole territory, institutions which from the days of the Roman empire to our own have been hardly known in the most civilized regions of the world, completed the system of superintendence and control. The whole society was a machine, regulated by a constitued order, and wrought, it should seem, into the habits and character of the people. The great secret of poor-law administration seems to have been discovered. "No one," we read, "at least none but the decrepit and the sick, was allowed to eat the bread of idleness. While industry was publicly commended and stimulated by rewards, idleness was a crime in the eye of the law, and as such severely punished." aged indolence or wasteful recklessness; where, with absolute anti-Malthusian statutes to enforce marriage, no redundant population appears to have encumbered society; where a despotism, a warlike and a conquering despotism, regarded, before its own resources of wealth and power, the sick and destitute; where new territories were constantly added by war to the dominions of the sovereign, yet at once shared in all the beneficent administration of the predominant people; where even religious bigotry conquered without persecution. Throughout their growing empire the incas established their own superstition, but, like the Romans, they awarded to the captive gods of the vanquished nations a place in the great Pantheon of Cuzco, and allowed the minds of the new tribes time to expand to the higher worship of the sun. The incas, too, like the Romans, subjugated the more savage tribes by means of their more polished language. The Quichua was established in the provinces as the language of law and public administration. The nature of the country in which arose this singular social system makes it, if possible, still more extraordinary. Peru offers a curious vague and general resemblance to the Holy Land. Some In this sentence, however, the manner in which districts of great natural fertility were environed by idleness was prevented is not very distinctly de- sandy deserts, with hardly any streams of water, and scribed. Mr. Prescott's gentle and harmonious requiring artificial irrigation. There were extensive phrases would hardly admit the vulgar fact, as it regions suited for the pasture of flocks—mountain appears in the old Spanish authorities. In truth, ranges only to be cultivated in terraces-but all as in the halcyon days of Queen Elizabeth, to which was on the vast scale of South American nature. the tender-hearted enemies of the new poor-law The mountains which were to be scarped into these look back with such soft regret, instead of the hanging gardens and broad plateaus were the vast work-house test, that is, confinement, with better Andes; the ravines which must be bridged, in food than the obstinate pauper could obtain out of order to connect the country by roads, were some its walls, there was Bridewell and a sound whip- of them so abrupt and profound that, according to ping at the discretion or the indiscretion of Dog- Humboldt, Vesuvius or the Puy de Dôme, placed berry, of the jailer, or at best of Justice Overdo- within the chasm, would not reach the summit of so in Peru, the overseers were armed with an un- the defile. The cultivation of the land was as artificial as the social system. Our agriculturists whole Peruvian polity, with its wisdom and hapmust be informed, that the three principal means piness, to the wicked devices of Satan, who would by which the Peruvians triumphed over their sterile and ungrateful soil, were by draining, by irrigation, and by guano! by this means, by thus building up a social fabric of such unexceptionable excellence, commend the cause of heathenism. For it is not merely Garcilassso de la Vega, the boasted descendant of the ineas, who has thus painted the Saturnian age of his forefathers. We can remember, indeed, the bewilderment, the perplexity, the involuntary scepticism with which, in the days of our youth, we explored the "Royal Commentaries," be it confessed (the original being unattainable) in the cum The public works, the fortresses, the roads, and the bridges attested the care of the government for the security and the convenience of the people. The ruins of fortresses still remain, astonishing from their solidity, considering that the use of iron was unknown, and that the vast masses of which they were composed must, apparently, have been transported by manual strength to great distances.brous and blundering English of old Sir Paul If the great roads, in their width and extent, will bear no comparison to those by which Rome connected her subject provinces with the capital-if they were only intended for the llamas to carry their burthens they passed through and over mountain passes which Roman engineering would hardly have attempted to surmount. Chasms were crossed by suspension bridges, at which even the heads of our Brunels and Stephensons might turn giddy, and made of materials on which, with all their boldness and ingenuity, they would hardly, with the fear of coroners' juries before them, venture the lives of her majesty's subjects. With all this, the astronomical knowledge of the Peruvians was lower than that of the Aztecs; their quipus, the cords by which alone they kept accounts and registered events their only art of writing and public press-were many degrees below the picture hieroglyphics of Mexico. One thing will perhaps astonish the modern reader more than all the rest with all this advanced civilization, this progress in certain arts, and with the vast quantity of the precious metals, of which they made their utensils and their ornaments, they were altogether ignorant of money! Gold and silver, which they obtained with some rude and imperfect art, and wrought with considerable skill and ingenuity into their rings, bracelets, and vessels, were used for such purposes alone. The incas had a royalty over all these treasures, but with no notion of coining them into a circulating medium for trade or barter. Rycaut, still doubting whether we were in the midst of Plato's Atlantis, or of the Arabian Nights. But, as Mr. Prescott justly observes, Garcilasso has added but little, if anything, to the accounts of the earliest writers, some of whom, as Acosta and Blas de Valera, he cites as his authorities; and Mr. Prescott has added to the mass of evidence that of two remarkable, and it should seem peculiarly trustworthy, testimonies. Juan de Sarmiento was president of the council of the Indies. He visited Peru at the time when the administration of Gasca had established peace by the discomfiture and death of the last of the Pizarros. He professed to have gathered the materials of his work from the best instructed of the inca race who had survived the Conquest. The Relacion of Sarmiento is still among the unpublished treasures of the Escorial. A second authority is that of an eminent jurist, Polo de Ondegardo, who resided at Lima about the same period; he appears to have been a wise and good man, to have acquired deserved popularity among the Indians, and to have given excellent advice as well as valuable information to successive viceroys; as a magistrate he had the best opportunities of studying the institutions of the country. Ondegardo's work was consulted by Herrera, but has not been printed. For his MS. copies both of it and Sarmiento, Mr. Prescott was indebted to Mr. O. Rich. The most singular testimony, however, to the social condition of the Peruvians, is the preamble to the will of Mancio Is all this history or romance-a legend or an Sierra Lejesama, the last survivor of the early imaginary Utopia? We have the strange alterna-Spanish conquerors, printed in the appendix of tive of accepting the account as in its general out-Mr. Prescott. It is a death-bed confession, partly, line at least, for historic verity, or of charging all no doubt, intended to expiate the soldier's sins, the old Spanish writers with a degree of invention but partly, we hope, drawn up under a feeling of and of creative power of which in other respects genuine compassion for the people whose mild and they seem entirely guiltless. We must suppose them to have entered into a conspiracy to elevate the character of the people whom they were trampling under foot-and to place in darker relief the cruelty, the treachery, and the rapacity of their own countrymen, by showing the innocent and happy polity which they destroyed. They were suggesting to others, even if they closed their own eyes in obstinate blindness, the perilous comparison between the effects of their own religion, and what might almost seem the more holy and beneficent idolatry of the Peruvians. Many, indeed, of these old writers, especially the ecclesiastics, were driven to the desperate resource of attributing the parental government he had contributed to overthrow, in order to subjugate them to the iron tyranny of the Spaniard. Mr. Prescott has preserved it in the old Spanish; but we think it worth while to translate the most striking passages: "For many years I have earnestly desired to render this information to my sovereign Lord King Philip, that most Catholie and Christian monarch, for the relief of my soul. I, who took so great part in the discovery, conquest, and settlement of that realm, of which we have deprived its lords the ineas, have his majesty know, that the said incas governed in order to place it under the crown of Spain, would the land in such a manner, that there was neither robber nor vicious man, nor man of pleasure, nor |