M. Bouguer continues, "they are totally indifferent to wealth and all its advantages. One does not know what to offer them to procure their services; it is in vain to offer money, they answer, that they are not hungry." Wealth, in the general acceptation of the word, can procure no advantages to men who have no means of disposing of it. Where there is no market, money can purchase nothing; and where the natural wants are abundantly supplied, and men's desires have not created artificial ones, a market is superfluous and useless; but wherever the indians can exchange the produce of the country they inhabit for whatever pleases them, they are always anxious to do it. The Logroño indians trade with the city of Cuenca; the Yumbos, Colorados, and Malabas with Quito; the Chunchos, Pehuenches, Huilliches, and other tribes with Conception; the Orejones with Huanuco; and numerous other tribes frequent the settlements nearest to them, for the purpose of bartering their commodities for others which are either useful or ornamental. Had M. Bouguer offered them beads, hawks' bells, _machetes_, large knives, bows, arrows, or poison for their darts, he would have obtained their services.
Dr. Robertson considers the indians to have been, at the time of the conquest by the Spaniards, less improved and more savage than the inhabitants of any part of the globe; but he afterwards limits this charge to the rudest tribes; a limitation which was very necessary, for the purpose of palliating what I cannot help believing to be a false accusation. He could not mean the tribe of the Muysca indians, who have left the fewest remains of their ingenuity, much less the Peruvians; and in Mexico, some of their cities were equal to the finest in Spain, according to the accounts given by Cortes, in his reports to the Emperor Charles V. These reports, and the yet existing monuments of labour and ingenuity, speak strongly in opposition to Robertson's statement.
Ulloa says, "one can hardly form an idea of them different from what one has of the brutes." Paul III. thought differently, when, by his celebrated bull, he declared them worthy of being considered as human beings. Ulloa might have said, with more truth, one can hardly form an idea of treatment more brutal than that which many of them receive. In the interior of Peru, as Ulloa speaks of the Peruvians, they were degraded by the _mita_, a scion of the law of _repartirnientos_, distribution of indians at the time of the conquest. By this law, the men were forced from their homes and their families to serve for a limited time an imperious master, who, if he approved of their labour, took care to advance them a little money or some equivalent above what their wages amounted to, and then obliged them to serve him until the debt was liquidated. By this time another debt was contracted; and thus it was that they became worse than slaves, except in the name. I have been on several estates in different parts of Peru and Quito where the annual stipend of an indian was no more than eighteen or twenty dollars; with which pittance he had probably to maintain a wife and family, besides paying his annual tribute of five or seven dollars and a half to the King. The result was generally this:--the father died indebted to his master, and his children were attached to the estate for the payment. I would now ask Don Antonio Ulloa, who are the brutes? The hut of one of these miserable indians consists of a few stones laid one upon another, without any cement or mortar, thatched over with some long grass or straw, which neither defends the unhappy inmates from the wind nor the rain; and such is the case on the _paramos_, or bleak mountains. One small room contains the whole family; their bed, a sheep skin or two, their covering, the few clothes which they wear during the day, for they have no others; their furniture, one or two earthen pots; and their food, a scanty provision of barley. Who that is possessed of Christian charity could witness this, and, instead of pitying their miserable condition, call them brutes? If of these Ulloa says, "nothing disturbs the tranquillity of their souls--equally insensible to disasters and to prosperity," his observation is just. Born under the lash of an imperious master, subject to the cruelty of an unfeeling mayordomo, they had no disasters to fear, because their condition could not possibly be rendered worse: with prosperity they had been totally unacquainted, it was a blessing which had fled the land they were born to tread, or rather it had been transferred to usurpers.