The South American Indians join to these advantages the remains of an advanced civilization--a civilization which, since the conquest, has sought a refuge in inaccessible lurking places, but for all that does not the less exist. The tribes or families regard themselves as parts of the same whole--the nation.
Now the aborigines, continually on terms of hostility with the Spaniards, have felt the necessity of doubling their strength in order to triumph, and their descendants have gradually modified whatever might be injurious in their manners, to appropriate those of their oppressors, and fight them with their own weapons. They have carried these tactics--which, by the way, have saved them from the yoke up to the present day--so far that they are thorough masters in roguery and trickery; their ideas have been enlarged, their intellect is developed, and they have succeeded in surpassing their enemies in astuteness and diplomacy, if we may be allowed to employ that expression.
This is so true, that not only have the Spaniards been unable to subjugate them during the past three hundred years, but have been actually obliged to pay them, with more or less goodwill, an annual tribute. Can we really regard as savages these men who, formerly driven back by their terror of firearms and dogs--animals of whose existence they were ignorant--to the heart of the Cordilleras, have defended their territory inch by inch, and in some regions have reconquered a portion of their native soil?
We know better than anybody that savages exist in America--savages in the full meaning of the term; but these are daily disappearing from the surface of the globe, as they have neither the necessary intellect to understand nor the energy to defend themselves. These are the Indians who, before being subjected to the Spaniards, were so to the Mexicans or Moluchos, owing to their intellectual organization, which scarce raises them above the brute.
These tribes which are but exceptions in the species, must not be confounded, then, with the great Molucho nations of which we are speaking, and whose manners we are describing--manners which are necessarily being modified; for, in spite of the efforts they make to escape from it, the European civilization, which they despise more through hereditary hatred of their conquerors than for any other motive, crushes and invades them on all sides.