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by Walter Hardenburg (Author)
IT is something of a terrible irony of fate that in a land whose people for unknown centuries, and up to only four hundred years ago, lived under social laws "so beneficent as had never been known under any ancient kings of Asia, Africa, or Europe, or under any Christian monarch"-laws recorded by a reliable historian and partly capable of verification by the traveller and student to-day-should, in the twentieth century, have been the scene of the ruination and wholesale torture and murder of tribes of its defenceless and industrious inhabitants. Under the Incas of Peru, as recorded by the Inca-Spanish historian Garcilaso de la Vega 1] and other early writers, human blood was never shed purposely; every inhabitant was provided for and had a place in a well-ordered social economic plan; there was no such condition as beggary or destitution; the people were instructed by statute to help each other co-operatively; injustice and corruption were unknown; and there was a belief in a Supreme Director of the Universe. Under the Peruvian republic and the regimen of absentee capitalism to-day, tribes of useful people of this same land have been defrauded, driven into slavery, ravished, tortured, and destroyed. This has been done, not in single instances at the command of some savage potentate, but in tens of thousands under a republican Government, in a Christianised country, at the behest of the agents of a great joint-stock company with headquarters in London: the "crime" of these unfortunates being that they did not always bring in rubber sufficiently fast-work for which they practically received no payment-to satisfy their taskmasters. In order to obtain rubber so that the luxurious-tyred motor-cars of civilisation might multiply in the cities of Christendom, the dismal forests of the Amazon have echoed with the cries of despairing and tortured Indian aborigines. These are not things of the imagination, but a bare statement of actual occurrence, as set forth by the various witnesses in this volume.
