History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume II (of 2) / Revised Edition

by John William Draper

Social system—the nobility, the people. As to their social system, polygamy was permitted, but practically it was confined to the higher classes. Social subordination was thoroughly understood. The Inca Tupac Yupanqui says, "Knowledge was never intended for the people, but only for those of generous blood." The nobility were of two orders, the polygamic descendants of the Incas, who were the main support of the state, and the adopted nobles of nations that have been conquered. As to the people, nowhere else in the whole world was such an [184] extraordinary policy of supervision practised. They were divided into groups of ten, fifty, one hundred, five hundred, one thousand, ten thousand, and over the last an Inca noble was placed. Through this system a rigid centralization was insured, the Inca being the pivot upon which all the national affairs turned, it was an absolutism worthy of the admiration of many existing European nations. Organization of Labour. The entire territory was divided into three parts; one belonged to the Sun, one to the Inca, one to the people. As a matter of form, the subdivision was annually made; in practice, however, as perhaps must always be the result of such agrarianism, the allotments were continually renewed. All the land was cultivated by the people, and in the following order: first, that of the Sun, then that of the destitute and infirm, then that of the people, and, lastly, that of the Inca. The Sun and the Inca owned all the sheep, which were sheared and their wool distributed to the people, or cotton furnished in its stead. The Inca's officers saw that it was all woven, and that no one was idle. An annual survey of the country, its farming and mineral products, was made, the inventory being transmitted to the government. A register was kept of births and deaths; periodically a general census was taken. The Inca, at once emperor and pope, was enabled, in that double capacity, to exert a rigorous patriarchal rule over his people, who were treated like mere children—not suffered to be oppressed, but compelled to be occupied; for, with a worldly wisdom which no other nation presents, labour was here acknowledged not only as a means, but also as an end. In Peru a man could not improve his social state; by these refinements of legislation he was brought into an absolutely stationary condition. He could become neither richer nor poorer; but it was the boast of the system that every one lived exempt from social suffering—that all enjoyed competence.

Military system; warlike resources.The army consisted of 200,000 men. Their weapons were bows, lances, slings, battle-axes, swords; their means of defence, shields, bucklers, helmets, and coats of quilted cotton. Each regiment had its own banner, but the imperial standard, the national emblem, was a rainbow, the offspring of the [185] Sun. The swords and many of the domestic implements were of bronze; the arrows were tipped with quartz or bone, or points of gold and silver. A strict discipline was maintained on marching, granaries and depôts being established at suitable distances on the roads. With a policy inflexibly persisted in, the gods of conquered countries were transported to Cuzco, and the vanquished compelled to worship the Sun; their children were obliged to learn the Peruvian language, the government providing them teachers for that purpose. As an incitement, this knowledge was absolutely required as a condition for public office. To amalgamate the conquered districts thoroughly, their inhabitants were taken away by ten thousand, transported to distant parts of the empire, not, as in the Old World, to be worked to death as slaves, but to be made into Peruvians; an equal number of natives were sent in their stead, to whom, as a recompense for their removal, extraordinary privileges were given. It was the immemorial policy of the empire to maintain profound tranquillity in the interior and perpetual war on the frontiers.

The philosophical advancement of the Peruvians was much retarded by their imperfect method of writing—a method greatly inferior to that of Egypt. Peruvian literature—the quipus.A cord of coloured threads, called quipus, was only indifferently suited to the purposes of enumeration, and by no means equal to hieroglyphics as a method of expressing general facts. But it was their only system. Notwithstanding this drawback, they had a literature consisting of poetry, dramatic compositions, and the like. Their scientific attainments were inferior to the Mexican. Their year was divided into months, their months into weeks. They had gnomons to indicate the solstices. One, in the form of an obelisk, in the centre of a circle, on which was marked an east and west line, indicated the equinox. These gnomons were destroyed by the Spaniards in the belief that they were for idolatrous purposes, for on the national festivals it was customary to decorate them with leaves and flowers. As the national religion consisted in the worship of the Sun, it was not without reason that Quito was regarded as a holy place, from its position upon the equator.

Agriculture carried to perfection. [186] In their extraordinary provisions for agriculture, the national pursuit, the skill of the Peruvians is well seen. A rapid elevation from the sea-level to the heights of the mountains gave them, in a small compass, every variety of climate, and they availed themselves of it. They terraced the mountain sides, filling the terraces with rich earth. They excavated pits in the sand, surrounded them with adobe walls, and filled them with manured soil. On the low level they cultivated bananas and cassava; on the terraces above, maize and quinoa; still higher, tobacco; and above that the potato. From a comparatively limited surface, they raised great crops by judiciously using manures, employing for that purpose fish, and especially guano. Their example has led to the use of the latter substance for a like purpose in our own times in Europe. The whole civilized world has followed them in the cultivation of the potato. The Peruvian bark is one of the most invaluable remedies. Large tracts of North America would be almost uninhabitable without the use of its active alkaloid quinine, which actually, in no insignificant manner, reduces the percentage mortality throughout the United States.

The great aqueduct of Condesuya.Indispensably necessary to their agricultural system were their great water-works. In Spain there was nothing worthy of being compared with them. The aqueduct of Condesuya was nearly 500 miles long. Its engineers had overcome difficulties in a manner that might well strike modern times with admiration. Its water was distributed as prescribed by law; there were officers to see to its proper use. From these great water-works and from their roads it may be judged that the architectural skill of the Peruvians was far from insignificant. They constructed edifices of porphyry, granite, brick; but their buildings were for the most part low, and suitable to an earthquake country.

The stages of human development always the same. I have dwelt at some length on the domestic history of Mexico and Peru because it is intimately connected with one of the philosophical principles which it is the object of this book to teach, viz., that human progress takes place under an unvarying law, and therefore in a definite way. The [187] trivial incidents mentioned in the preceding paragraphs may perhaps have seemed insignificant or wearisome, but it is their very commonness, their very familiarity, that gives them, when rightly considered, a surprising interest. There is nothing in these minute details but what we find to be perfectly natural from the European point of view. They might be, for that matter, instead of reminiscences of the spontaneous evolution of a people shut out from the rest of the world by impassable oceans, a relation of the progress of some European or Asiatic nation. The man of America advanced in his course of civilization as did the man of the Old World, devising the same institutions, guided by the same intentions, constrained by the same desires. From the great features of his social system down to the little details of his domestic life, there is a sameness with what was done in Asia, Africa, Europe. But similar results imply a similar cause. What, then, is there possessed in common by the Chinese, the Hindoo, the Egyptian, the European, the American? Surely not climate, nor equal necessities, nor equal opportunity. Simply nothing but this—corporeal organization! As automatons constructed in the same way will do the same things, so, in organic forms, sameness of structure will give rise to identity of function and similarity of acts. The same common sense guides men all over the world. Common sense is a function of common organization. All natural history is full of illustrations. Analogy between societies of men and societies of animals. It may be offensive to our pride, but it is none the less true, that in his social progress, the free-will of which man so boasts himself in his individual capacity disappears as an active influence, and the domination of general and inflexible laws becomes manifest. The free-will of the individual is supplanted by instinct and automatism in the race. To each individual bee the career is open; he may taste of this flower and avoid that; he may be industrious in the garden, or idle away his time in the air; but the history of one hive is the history of another hive; there will be a predestined organization—the queen, the drones, the workers. In the midst of a thousand unforeseen, uncalculated, variable acts, a definite result, with unerring certainty, emerges; the combs are built in a pre-ordained way, and filled with honey at last. [188] From bees, and wasps, and ants, and birds—from all that low animal life on which he looks with such supercilious contempt, man is destined one day to learn what in truth he really is.

The crime of Spain in America. For a second reason, also, I have dwelt on these details. The enormous crime of Spain in destroying this civilization has never yet been appreciated in Europe. After an attentive consideration of the facts of the case, I agree in the conclusion of Carli, that at the time of the conquest the moral man in Peru was superior to the European, and I will add, the intellectual man also. Was there in Spain, or even in all Europe, a political system carried out into the practical details of actual life, and expressed in great public works, as its outward visible and enduring sign, which could at all compare with that of Peru? Its only competitor was the Italian system, but that for long had been actively used to repress the intellectual advancement of man. The Spaniard and the American. In vain the Spaniards excuse their atrocities on the plea that a nation like the Mexican, which permitted cannibalism, should not be regarded as having emerged from the barbarous state, and that one which, like Peru, sacrificed human hecatombs at the funeral solemnities of great men, must have been savage. Let it be remembered that there is no civilized nation whose popular practices do not lag behind its intelligence; let it be remembered that in this respect Spain herself also was guilty. In America, human sacrifice was part of a religious solemnity, unstained by passion. The auto da fé of Europe was a dreadful cruelty; not an offering to heaven, but a gratification of spite, hatred, fear, vengeance—the most malignant passions of earth. European and American human sacrifice. There was no spectacle on the American continent at which a just man might so deeply blush for his race as that presented in Western Europe when the heretic from whom confession had been wrung by torture passed to his stake in a sleeveless garment, with flames of fire and effigies of an abominable import depicted upon it. Let it be remembered that by the Inquisition, from 1481 to 1808, 340,000 persons had been punished, and of these nearly 32,000 burnt. Let what was done in the south of France be remembered. Let it be also [189] remembered that, considering the worthlessness of the body of man, and that, at the best, it is at last food for the worm—considering the infinite value of his immortal soul, for the redemption of which the agony and death of the Son of God were not too great a price to pay—indignities offered to the body are less wicked than indignities offered to the soul. It would be well for him who comes forward as an accuser of Mexico and Peru in their sin to dispose of the fact that at that period the entire authority of Europe was directed to the perversion, and even total repression of thought—to an enslaving of the mind, and making that noblest creation of Heaven a worthless machine. To taste of human flesh is less criminal in the eye of God than to stifle human thought.

Antiquity of American civilization.Lastly, there is another point to which I will with brevity allude. It has been widely asserted that Mexican and Peruvian civilization was altogether a recent affair, dating at most only two or three centuries before the conquest. It would be just as well to say that there was no civilization in India before the time of the Macedonian invasion because there exist no historic documents in that country anterior to that event. The Mexicans and Peruvians were not heroes of a romance to whom wonderful events were of common occurrence, whose lives were regulated by laws not applying to the rest of the human race, who could produce results in a day for which elsewhere a thousand years are required. They were men and women like ourselves, slowly and painfully, and with many failures, working out their civilization. The summary manner in which they have been disposed of reminds us of the amusing way in which the popular chronology deals with the hoary annals of Egypt and China. Putting aside the imperfect methods of recording events practised by the autochthons of the Western world, he who estimates rightly the slowness with which man passes forward in his process of civilization, and collates therewith the prodigious works of art left by those two nations—an enduring evidence of the point to which they had attained—will find himself constrained to cast aside such idle assertions as altogether unworthy of confutation, or even of attention.

CHAPTER VI. APPROACH OF THE AGE OF REASON IN EUROPE. IT IS PRECEDED BY THE RISE OF CRITICISM.

Restoration of Greek Literature and Philosophy in Italy.—Development of Modern Languages and Rise of Criticism.—Imminent Danger to Latin Ideas.