INDIAN WATER CARRIER, SICUANI.
escape tribute. The poorest gave lice, “making themselves clean and not void of employment in so doing.” Who, indeed, were the poor? Those who were incapable of work, who had to be fed and clothed out of the king’s store.
“There were no particular tradesmen ... but every one learned what was needful for their persons and houses and provided for themselves.”
Laws would hardly seem necessary to control so exemplary a nation. Here, however, are a few paternal laws, thought necessary by the Lover of the Poor: against the adornment of clothing with gold and silver and jewels; against profuseness in banquet and delicacies in diet; against the ill manners of children; of good husbandry and hospitality; providing a new division of lands every year, according to the increase and diminution of families; punishing those who destroyed landmarks or turned the water aside; devoting the services of all master workmen to the Inca, and supplying them with gold and silver and other materials for the exercise of their ingenuity.
Since the Sun-god, or the Inca, had benignly bestowed them for the people’s good, laws received the same veneration as the precepts of religion, from which no subject of the Incas could dissociate them. A breaker of the law was guilty of sacrilege, and no punishment could be too severe. In fact, most crimes were punishable by death. The sinner was thrown over a precipice or into a ditch of serpents, jaguars, and pumas. The worst sin of all, high treason, exacted in expiation not only the death of the sinner, but that of his family, even of his neighbors. His very trees were pulled up by the roots, and his fields sown with salt. “But as there was never any such offense committed, so there was never any such severity executed,” a mitigating remark of Garcilasso in connection with a certain crime.
The basis of the Inca government was tribute, personal labor given to the Sun and to the Inca, a source of continual delight, a supreme privilege. So the Sun, or his representative the Inca, was furnished by his people with food, tilled by them from his own ground; clothing for his soldiers or his needy from the wool of his own flocks; bows and arrows, lances and clubs, ropes for carrying burdens, helmets and targets each where most easily procurable. Temples and palaces of the Inca, his aqueducts, roads, and bridges were built with hymns of rejoicing. The laborers never got out of breath so as to spoil the cadence of the hymn of triumph; the chroniclers fail to say whether in obedience to law or from a sense of good taste.
In addition, all the provinces paid tribute of the most beautiful women, who were kept in convents as wives of the Inca; and he might choose any who suited him.
The great maxim of the Incas was increase of empire, their plea being the best interest of the tribes they were to conquer. The Inca sent word that he would come “not to take away their lives or estates, but to confer upon them all those benefits which the Sun, his father, had commanded him to perform toward the Indians. He (would come) to do them good, by teaching them to live according to rules of reason and laws of nature, and that, leaving their idols, they should henceforward adore the Sun for their only god, by whose gracious command he had received them to pardon. To which end, and to no other purpose (for he stood in no need of their service) he traveled from country to country.”