on, superstition, cruelty have marked their
exploitation in past ages, and as we explore their grim abandoned
corridors, and pass half fearfully their yawning pits, our imagination
might conjure up some phantoms of those who toiled amid these old
scenes of man's sweat and avarice.

The cruelty innate in the Spanish race has been shown in their mining
methods, and the native population of Mexico, and in a larger scale of
Peru, suffered severely at their hands. Guanajuato, one of the most
famous and richest of the mining centres of Mexico--in past times as
to-day--bears in its archives the stories of oppression which marked
the methods of the Spaniards, and may be taken as a concrete example.
It was a system of slavery under which these mines were worked--an
atrocious system of forced labour which took no heed of Indian life,
save as it might most cheaply extract a given quantity of gold or
silver ore from the pits and adits beneath the ground. Thousands of
_peones_ were impressed into this forced labour; armed soldiers were
stationed at the entrances of these labyrinths to see that each
wretched serf deposited his sack of rock, under the load of which he
had toiled up fathoms of notched pole, or ladder, from the infernal
regions below, panting, sweating, expiring, and presently driven down
again by the brutal taskmasters, jealous lest he might enjoy too much
of the light of day and so sacrifice some moments in the delving amid
the rocks which furnished the wealth. In 1619, a law was promulgated in
Guanajuato--it remains upon the archives to this day--prohibiting the
branding of slaves upon the face!

But these inhuman methods brought about their own punishment. The great
Valenciana mine, opened in 1760, which for fifty years was worked at a
sacrifice of human life by these methods, producing more than 300
million dollars, became at last the scene of a terrible vengeance, for
the serfs rose in rebellion and massacred every white man upon the
place. Indeed, the brutalities practised by the Spanish mine-owners
largely influenced the revolution and secession from the mother
country.

For more than three centuries there flowed from the mines of Mexico and
Peru, millions and millions of silver and gold, which went to fill the
needy coffers of Spain, to enrich a distant and callous or careless
monarch, and to prop up a moribund nation. The appalling system of the
_mitad_ and the _encomenderos_, by which silver and gold were