That which I owe is lost; but if you please
To shoot another arrow that self way
Which you did shoot the first, I do not doubt
As I will watch the aim, or to find both
Or bring your latter hazard back again
And thankfully rest debtor for the first.'
But not thus will our serious questions meet with satisfactory answers.
The first thing to be noted in the enquiry, perhaps, is that it is altogether a misnomer to call Peru a Republic. Whatever else it be, a Republic it certainly is not, and never has been a Republic. Its political constitution and its laws have nothing whatever to do with the people, nor have the people aught to do with them; and they care for them as they care for the theory of gravitation, or any other portion of demonstrable knowledge, from which they may indeed derive some animal comfort in its application, but the application of which will probably never enlighten their souls. The people of Peru know as much of liberty as they know of the Virgin Mary. The priests once or twice a year dress the image of the Jewish maiden in tawdry attire, put a tinsel crown on her head, and call her the Mother of God and the Queen of Heaven, and the people fall down and worship; which they are perfectly at liberty to do, as the impostors who lead them to do so may get their living in that way, as all other impostors obtain theirs who possess the people's grace. In like fashion, all that the people know of liberty they know thus. They know as much of it as an aristocrat cares to teach them—as a quack can tell his patient of medicine, or the showy proprietress of a showy school can teach an intelligent girl the use of the globes. All native-born Peruvians of full age have votes, at least all such as can read and write, or possess a certain amount of real property. But reading and writing are not by any means universal accomplishments in the Peruvian Republic, and there are fewer holders of real estate among the working classes than maybe found in Barbados among the coloured labourers of that beautiful but misgoverned island.
Don Juan Espinosa, an old Peruvian soldier, and one of the few South American writers whose literary works have been translated into French, if not also into English, wrote some twenty years ago a republican, democratic, moral, political, and philosophical dictionary for the people. Strange to say, he has given us no definition of a Republic in his highly-entertaining and instructive book. Two of his longest articles, however, are devoted, the first to the subject of 'Independence,' and the second to 'Revolution.' The manner in which the author concludes the first is suggestive: 'On one day,' he says, 'we were all brothers and countrymen; brothers by blood, and countrymen of a land which we had just irrigated with our blood. O day immortal for humanity! On this day the Saviour of the world beheld the consummation of his work; he saw the spectacle which years before had led the way for 1824. He without doubt designed the camp of Ayacucho as the first embrace of all the races, and the signal also for the suppression of all human rivalries. Afterwards'