Have you gazed on naked grandeur where there's nothing 
    else to gaze on, 
   Set pieces and drop curtain scenes galore, 
   Big mountains heaved to heaven, which the blinding sunsets 
   Black canyons where the rapids rip and roar?

           - Robert W. Service.


Bolivia, having no sea-coast, has been termed the Hermit Republic of South America. Its territory is over 600,000 square miles in extent, and within its bounds Nature displays almost every possible panorama, and all climates. There are burning plains, the home of the emu, armadillos, and ants; sandy deserts, where the wind drifts the sand like snow, piling it up in ever-shifting hills about thirty feet in height. Bolivia, shut in geographically and politically, is a world in itself - a world of variety, in scenery, climate, products and people. Its capital city, La Paz, has a population of 70,000, but the vast interior is almost uninhabited. In the number of inhabitants to the square mile, Bolivia ranks the lowest of all the nations of the earth.

Perhaps no country of the world has been, and is, so rich in precious metals as Bolivia. "The mines of Potosi alone have furnished the world over $1,500,000,000 worth of silver since the Spaniards first took possession of them." [Footnote: "Protestant Missions in South America."]

Bolivia can lay claim to the most wonderful body of water in the world - Lake Titicaca. This lake, nearly two and a half miles high in the air, is literally in the clouds. "Its lonely waters have no outlet to the sea, but are guarded on their southern shores by gigantic ruins of a prehistoric empire - palaces, temples, and fortresses - silent, mysterious monuments of a long-lost golden age." Some of the largest and most remarkable ruins of the world are found on the shores of Lake Titicaca, and as this was the centre of the great Incan Dynasty, that remarkable people have also left wonderful remains, to build which stones thirty-eight feet long, eighteen feet wide, and six feet thick, were quarried, carried and elevated. The Temple of the Sun. the most sacred edifice of the Incas, was one of the richest buildings the sun has ever shone upon, and it was itself a mine of wealth. From this one temple, Pizarro, the Spanish conqueror, took 24,000 pounds of gold and 82,000 pounds of silver. "Ninety million dollars' worth of precious metals was torn from Inca temples alone." The old monarch of the country, Atahuallpa, gave Pizarro twenty-two million dollars in gold to buy back his country and his liberty from the Spaniards, but their first act on receiving the vast ransom was to march him after a crucifix at the head of a procession, and, because he refused to become a Roman Catholic, put him to death. Perhaps never in the world's history was there a baser act of perfidy, but this was urged by the soldier-priest of the conquerors, Father Valverde, who himself signed the King's death- warrant. This priest was afterwards made Bishop of Atahuallpa's capital.

Surely no country of the world has had a darker or a sadder history than this land of the Incas. The Spaniards arrived when the "Children of the Sun" were at the height of their prosperity. "The affair of reducing the country was committed to the hands of irresponsible individuals, soldiers of fortune, desperate adventurers who entered on conquest as a game which they had to play in the most unscrupulous manner, with little care but to win it. The lands, and the persons as well, of the conquered races were parcelled out and appropriated by the victors as the legitimate spoils of victory. Every day outrages were perpetrated, at the contemplation of which humanity shudders. They suffered the provident arrangements of the Incas to fall into decay. The poor Indian, without food, now wandered half-starved and naked over the plateau. Even those who aided the Spaniards fared no better, and many an Inca noble roamed a mendicant over the fields where he once held rule; and if driven, perchance, by his necessities to purloin something from the superfluity of his conquerors, he expiated it by a miserable death." [Footnote: Prescott's "Conquest of Peru."]

Charles Kingsley says there were "cruelties and miseries unexampled in the history of Christendom, or perhaps on earth, save in the conquests of Sennacherib and Zinghis-Khan." Millions perished at the forced labor of the mines, The Incan Empire had, it is calculated, a population of twenty millions at the arrival of the Spaniards, In two centuries the population fell to four millions.

When the groans of these beasts of burden reached the ears of the good (?) Queen Isabel of Spain, she enacted a law that throughout her new dominions no Indian, man or woman, should be compelled to carry more than three hundred pounds' weight at one load! Is it cause for wonder that the poor, down-trodden natives, seeing the flaunting flag of Spain, with its stripe of yellow between stripes of red, should regard it as representing a river of gold between two rivers of blood?

"Not infrequently," said a reliable witness, "I have seen the Spaniards, long after the Conquest, amuse themselves by hunting down the natives with blood hounds, for mere sport, or in order to train their dogs to the game. The most unbounded scope was given to licentiousness. The young maiden was torn remorselessly from the arms of her family to gratify the passion of her brutal conqueror. The sacred houses of the Virgins of the Sun were broken open and violated, and the cavalier swelled his harem with a troop of Indian girls, making it seem that the crescent would have been a more fitting emblem for his banner than the immaculate cross."

With the inexorable conqueror came the more inexorable priest. "Attendance at Roman Catholic worship was made compulsory. Men and women with small children were compelled to journey as much as thirty-six miles to attend mass. Absentees were punished, therefore the Indian feared to disobey." [Footnote: Neely, "Spanish America."]

As is well known, the ancient inhabitants worshipped the sun and the moon. The Spanish priest, in order to gain proselytes with greater facility, did not forbid this worship, but placed the crucifix between the two. Where the Inca suns and moons were of solid gold and silver, they were soon replaced by painted wooden ones. The crucifix, with sun and moon images on each side, is common all over Bolivia to-day.

Now, four hundred years later, see the Indian under priestly rule. The following is taken from an official report of the Governor of Chimborazo: "The religious festivals that the Indians celebrate - not of their own will, but by the inexorable will of the priest - are, through the manner in which they are kept, worse than those described to us of the times of Paganism, and of monstrous consequences to morality and the national welfare ... they may be reckoned as a barbarous mixture of idolatry and superstition, sustained by infamous avarice. The Indian who is chosen to make a feast either has to use up in it his little savings, leaving his family submerged in misery, or he has to rob in order to invest the products of his crime in paying the fees to the priest and for church ceremonies. These are simply brutal orgies that last many days, with a numerous attendance, and in which all manner of crimes and vices have free license."

"For the idols of the aborigines were substituted the images of the Virgin Mary and the Roman saints. The Indians gave up their old idols, but they went on with their image-worship. Image-worship is idolatry, whether in India, Africa, or anywhere else, and the worship of Roman images is essentially idolatry as much as the worship of any other kind of images. Romanism substituted for one set of idols another set. So the Indians who were idolaters continued to be idolaters, only the new idols had other names and, possibly, were a little better-looking." [Footnote: Neely, "South America."]

What has Romanism done for the Indians of Bolivia in its four hundred years of rule? Compare the people of that peaceful, law-keeping dynasty which the Spaniards found with the Bolivian Indian of to-day! Now the traveller can report: "The Indians are killing the whites wherever they find them, and practising great cruelties, having bored holes in the heads of their victims and sucked the brains out while they were yet alive. Sixteen whites are said to have been killed in this way! These same Indians are those who have been Christianized by the Roman priests for the past three centuries, but such cruelties as they have been practising show that as yet not a ray of Christ's love has entered their darkened minds." How can the priest teach what he is himself ignorant of?

Where the Indian has been civilized, as well as Romanized, Mr. Milne, of the American Bible Society, could write:

"Since the Spanish conquest the progress of the Indians has been in the line of deterioration and moral degradation. They are oppressed by the Romish clergy, who can never drain contributions enough out of them, and who make the children render service to pay for masses for deceased parents and relatives. Tears came to our eyes as Mr. Penzotti and I watched them practising their heathen rites in the streets of La Paz, the chief city of Bolivia. They differ from the other Indians in that they are domesticated, but they know no more of the Gospel than they did under the rule of the Incas."

What is to be the future of these natives? Shall they disappear from the stage of the world's history like so many other aborigines, victims of civilization, or will a hand yet be stretched out to help them? Civilization, after all, is not entirely made up of greed and lust, but in it there is righteousness and truth. May the day soon dawn when some of the latter may be extended to them ere they take the long, dark trail after their fathers, and have hurled the last malediction at their cursed white oppressors!

  "We suffer yet a little space 
   Until we pass away, 
  The relics of an ancient race 
   That ne'er has had its day."

For four hundred years Bolivia has thus been held in chains by Romish priestcraft. Since its Incan rulers were massacred, its civilization has been of the lowest. Buildings, irrigation dams, etc., were suffered to fall into disrepair, and the country went back to pre-Incan days.

The first Christian missionaries to enter the country were imprisoned and murdered. Now "the morning light is breaking." A law has been passed granting liberty of worship.

Bolivia, with its vast natural riches, must come to the forefront, and already strides are being taken forward. She can export over five million dollars' worth of rubber in one year, and is now spending more than fifty million dollars on railways. So Bolivia is a country of the past and the future.