time he could not properly call his own. Without money, with little
property of any kind, he paid his taxes in labor.38 No wonder that the
government should have dealt with sloth as a crime. It was a crime
against the state, and to be wasteful of time was, in a manner, to rob the
exchequer. The Peruvian, laboring all his life for others, might be
compared to the convict in a treadmill, going the same dull round of
incessant toil, with the consciousness, that, however profitable the results
to the state, they were nothing to him.

But this is the dark side of the picture. If no man could become rich in
Peru, no man could become poor. No spendthrift could waste his
substance in riotous luxury. No adventurous schemer could impoverish
his family by the spirit of speculation. The law was constantly directed
to enforce a steady industry and a sober management of his affairs. No
mendicant was tolerated in Peru. When a man was reduced by poverty
or misfortune, (it could hardly be by fault,) the arm of the law was
stretched out to minister relief; not the stinted relief of private charity,
nor that which is doled out, drop by drop, as it were, from the frozen
reservoirs of "the parish," but in generous measure, bringing no
humiliation to the object of it, and placing him on a level with the rest of
his countrymen.39

No man could be rich, no man could be poor, in Peru; but all might
enjoy, and did enjoy, a competence. Ambition, avarice, the love of
change, the morbid spirit of discontent, those passions which most
agitate the minds of men, found no place in the bosom of the Peruvian.
The very condition of his being seemed to be at war with change. He
moved on in the same unbroken circle in which his fathers had moved
before him, and in which his children were to follow. It was the object
of the Incas to infuse into their subjects a spirit of passive obedience and