The extremes of civilization and barbarism are nearer together
in those countries which the Spaniards have wrested from their
native inhabitants, than in any other portion of the globe.
Before other European races, aboriginal tribes, even the
fiercest, gradually disappear. They hold their own before the
descendants of the _conquistadores_, who conquered the New
World only to be conquered by it. Out of Spain the Spaniard
deteriorates, and nowhere so much as in South America. Of course
he is superior there to the best of the Indian tribes with which
he is thrown in contact; but we doubt whether he is superior to
the intelligent, but forgotten, races which peopled the regions
around him centuries before Pizzaro set foot therein, and which
built enormous cities whose ruins have long been overgrown by
forests. To compare the Spaniard of to-day, in Peru, with its
ancient Incas is to do him no honor. To be sure, he is a
good Catholic, which the Incas were not, but he is indolent,
enervated, and enslaved by his own passions. His religion has not
done much for him--at least in this world, whatever it may do in
the next. It has done still less, if that be possible, for the
aboriginal Peruvians.

"In all parts of Peru," says a recent traveler, "except amongst
the savage Indian tribes, Christianity, at least nominally
prevails. The aborigines, however, converted by the sword in the
old days of Spanish persecution, do not, as a rule, seem to have
more notion of that faith in the country parts, than such as
may be obtained from stray visits of some errant, image-bearing
friar, whose principal object is to obtain sundry _reals_ in
consideration of prayers offered to his little idols. These