t of the use
of iron. The greatest human development has depended upon that last
metal. The great nations are those which have had the steel-tempered
sword blades in their hands. They could administer a colony in a way
to excite the admiration of the world, and yet not write a line. There
is little probability that they would have progressed much beyond the
state at which {71} they had arrived, _for there was no individual
liberty in the land_. That was the fatal defect in their system. It
was the lack which put that touch of finality to their otherwise
marvelously developed condition and which limited inexorably their
civilization. The unchangeable conditions were stifling to ambition
and paralyzing to achievement. The two things the country lacked were
the two vital things to human progress and human success--letters and
liberty.

The religious development of the Peruvians was very high. They
worshipped an unknown Supreme Being and they worshipped him, it is
conclusively demonstrated, without human sacrifice. Objectively they
paid their chief adoration to the sun, moon and stars, and to the Inca
as the child or earthly representative of the sun. Sun-worship is the
noblest and highest of all the purely natural religions. When to this
was superadded an instinctive feeling for a great First Cause, of which
the solar magnificence was but a manifestation, the religion of the
Peruvians is entitled to great respect.

Their history ran back into the mists of the past. At the time of the
arrival of Pizarro, a curious condition, anomalous in their records,
had arisen. Huayna Capac, one of the greatest monarchs of the Inca
line, had extended his dominion by force of arms over the rich province
of Quito, far to the north. He had taken as one of his concubines the
daughter of the conquered monarch of Quito and by her had a son named
Atahualpa.[4]

The son of the monarch by his sister, his only legal {72} wife, or
Coya--the irrevocable Peruvian method of providing for the Inca
succession--was named Huascar. Huayna on his deathbed, after a
glorious reign of forty years, made the fatal mistake of dividing his
dominion between Huascar, to whom was given ancient Peru, and
Atahualpa, who took Quito to the north. World-history, of which Huayna
could have known nothing, has shown conclusively enough that such a
policy has always brought about civil war, and this startling reversal
of Peruvian custom by a doting monarc