of the four great roads that diverged from Cuzco, the capital or navel of
the Peruvian monarchy. The city was in like manner divided into four
quarters; and the various races, which gathered there from the distant
parts of the empire, lived each in the quarter nearest to its respective
province. They all continued to wear their peculiar national costume, so
that it was easy to determine their origin; and the same order and system
of arrangement prevailed in the motley population of the capital, as in
the great provinces of the empire. The capital, in fact, was a miniature
image of the empire.4

The four great provinces were each placed under a viceroy or governor,
who ruled over them with the assistance of one or more councils for the
different departments. These viceroys resided, some portion of their
time, at least, in the capital, where they constituted a sort of council of
state to the Inca.5 The nation at large was distributed into decades, or
small bodies of ten; and every tenth man, or head of a decade, had
supervision of the rest,---being required to see that they enjoyed the
rights and immunities to which they were entitled, to solicit aid in their
behalf from government, when necessary, and to bring offenders to
justice. To this last they were stimulated by a law that imposed on them,
in case of neglect, the same penalty that would have been incurred by the
guilty party. With this law hanging over his head, the magistrate of Peru,
we may well believe, did not often go to sleep on his post.6

The people were still further divided into bodies of fifty, one hundred,
five hundred, and a thousand, with each an officer having general
supervision over those beneath, and the higher ones possessing, to a
certain extent, authority in matters of police. Lastly, the whole empire
was distributed into sections or departments of ten thousand inhabitants,
with a governor over each, from the Inca nobility, who had control over