of 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 likely
to develop. If he betook himself to the town his possible usefulness
lessened in proportion as he fell into drunken or dissolute habits, or
lapsed into a state of lazy and vacuous dreaminess, enlivened only by
chatter or the rolling of a cigarette. On the other hand, when employed
in a capacity where native talent might be tested, he often revealed a
power of action which, if properly guided, could be turned to excellent
account. As a cowboy, for example, he became a capital horseman, brave,
alert, skillful, and daring.

Commerce with Portugal and Spain was long confined to yearly fairs and
occasional trading fleets that plied between fixed points. But when
liberal decrees threw open numerous ports in the mother countr