ians from serfdom and ill-usage met with scant respect at the hands
of the distant settlers and mine-owners, who bid defiance to the humane
and protective regulations of the council of the Indies, and treated the
unhappy natives little better than beasts of burden. The statement,
moreover, that some eight millions of Indians perished through forced
labour in the mines is a gross exaggeration. The annual diminution in
the number of the Indian population was undoubtedly very great, but it
was due far more to the result of European epidemics and to indulgence
in alcohol than to hard work. The abortive insurrection of 1780-82, led
by the Inca Tupac Amaru, was never a general rising, and was directed
rather against Creole tyranny than against Spanish rule. The heavy
losses sustained by the Indians during that outbreak, and their dislike
and distrust of the colonial Spaniard, account for the comparative
indifference with which they viewed the rise and progress of the 1814
colonial revolt against Spain, which gave the South American states
their independence.

War of Independence.

We are only concerned here with the War of Independence so far as it
affected Upper Peru, the Bolivia of later days. When the patriots of
Buenos Aires had succeeded in liberating from the dominion of Spain the
interior provinces of the Rio de la Plata, they turned their arms
against their enemies who held Upper Peru. An almost uninterrupted
warfare followed, from July 1809 till August 1825, with alternate
successes on the side of the Spanish or royalist and the South American
or patriot forces,--the scene of action lying chiefly between the
Argentine provinces of Salta and Jujuy and the shores of Lake Titicaca.
The first movement of the war was the successful invasion of Upper Peru
by the army of Buenos Aires, under General Balcarce, which, after twice
defeating the Spanish troops, was able to celebrate the first
anniversary of independence near Lake Titicaca, in May 1811. Soon,
however, the patriot army, owing to the dissolute conduct and negligence
of its leaders, became disorganized, and was attacked and defeated, in
June 1811, by the Spanish army under Gey fol Goyeneche, and driven back
into Jujuy. Four years of warfare, in which victory was alternately
with the Spaniards and the patriots, was terminated in 1815 by the total
rout of the latter in a battle which took place between Potosi and
Oruro. To this succeeded a revolt of the Indians o