superiority to the colored masses beneath them.

Manual labor and trade had never attracted the Spaniards and the
Portuguese. The army, the church, and the law were the three
callings that offered the greatest opportunity for distinction.
Agriculture, grazing, and mining they did not disdain, provided
that superintendence and not actual work was the main requisite.
The economic organization which the Spaniards and Portuguese
established in America was naturally a more or less faithful
reproduction of that to which they had been accustomed at home.
Agriculture and grazing became the chief occupations. Domestic
animals and many kinds of plants brought from Europe throve
wonderfully in their new home. Huge estates were the rule; small
farms, the exception. On the ranches and plantations vast droves
of cattle, sheep, and horses were raised, as well as immense
crops. Mining, once so much in vogue, had become an occupation of
secondary importance.

On their estates the planter, the ranchman, and the mine owner
lived like feudal overlords, waited upon by Indian and negro
peasants who also tilled the fields, tended the droves, and dug
the earth for precious metals and stones. Originally the natives
had been forced to work under conditions approximating actual
servitude, but gradually the harsher features of this system had
given way to a mode of service closely resembling peonage. Paid a
pitifully small wage, provided with a hut of reeds or sundried
mud and a tiny patch of soil on which to grow a few hills of the
corn and beans that were his usual nourishment, the ordinary
Indian or half-caste laborer was scarcely more than a beast of
burden, a creature in whom civic virtues of a high order were not