They (the Indians) were proud, loyal, and ingenuous. Their heads were encircled with plumes of great value. Would to God the white men had been like Atahualpa and Montezuma!

INTRODUCTION
Far from the populous and noisy cities of the white man's restless life, protected by the double rampart of the Cordilleras, "the bronze race" pursues its monotonous existence.

The outsider who impartially contemplates it feels it to be very remote and very different from his own. Indeed, it is hard for him to discern its misty outlines at all against the uniformly gray background of the Andes from which it seems to emerge.

He has the impression of finding himself on the threshold of an unknown world, in which man and Nature, in complete harmony with each other, are alike hostile to him. But he also senses spiritual vibrations that set him atremble with apprehension and curiosity.

However little he may have read of the ancient history of this land, however little he may have heard of its legends and its myths, he catches the reflection of the past in the present and begins to understand the soul of the Indian. He vaguely divines the hopes and regrets that lie hidden beneath conformity and routine. Then this whole tableau, which appeared frozen into immobility, becomes strangely animated, and Nature itself, full of lingering echoes, seems to come to life. The past springs up imperiously on all sides; it is the ground in which the present has its roots.

To the mind that is capable of detaching itself from the present, all now becomes clear. The shepherd, leading his flock of llamas through the solitude of the plateau, draws from his reed flute melancholy notes in a minor key that have come down to him across the ages. The farmer, squatting before the door of his mud hut, remains for hours hunched up, his legs and feet pressed close together and his knees drawn up level with his chin, without moving, without thinking, immersed in a vacuity congenial to his dreamy spirit.

All these people live at a slackened pace, at one with their environment, defying time. They speak the language of their ancestors; they marry within their clan; they live a communal life; they invoke their ancient idols under new names.

The form may have become Spanish and Catholic, but the substance is as immutable as the mountain and the forest. One would think this a world held in abeyance. A parenthesis was opened at the moment when the white conquerors came; it has not yet been closed. The course of history has remained suspended for four hundred years. If the Inca were to come back to life, he would find his people as he left them long ago, ready to welcome him. An instant would suffice to efface the memory of the white man's interregnum.

What, then, is this empire that defies the passage of time, that survives in spite of all the upheavals that have convulsed the world, an empire whose mark four centuries of history have not been able to blot out? ...

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By LOUIS BAUDIN
Translated from the French by KATHERINE WOODS
Edited bry ARTHUR GODDARD
D. VAN NOSTRAND COMPANY, INC.

Foreword
I. The inborn inequality of the various individuals of the human species poses the most intricate problem for all interhuman relations. In any social system the main issue is how to promote peaceful co-operation among people markedly different from one another not only in bodily characteristics but also in mental capacity, will power, and moral strength.

For thousands of years people knew only one method of dealing with inborn inequality: to make the superiority of the stronger over the weaker prevail throughout. The stronger beat the weaker into submission. A hierarchical order of hereditary castes was established under which the kings and aristocrats administered all affairs for their own benefit, while the lower strata of the population had no other function than that of toiling for their masters and of making life as agreeable as possible for them.

The modern system of the market economy-capitalism-radically differs from the status system of the ancien regime. On the market the consumers, i.e., all of the people, are supreme. They determine by their buying or abstention from buying what should be produced, in what quantity, and of what quality..By the instrumentality of profit and loss, the entrepreneurs and the capitalists are forced to cater to the wishes of the consumers. There is only one method for the acquisition and preservation of wealth, viz., to supply the consumers in the best possible and cheapest way with those commodities and services which they ask for most urgently.

Thus, the more gifted members of society are induced to serve the concerns of everybody, including the hosts of less efficient and less gifted people. In the status society private property served the owners exclusively. In the capitalistic society private ownership of the means of production virtually serves all those who consume the goods produced.

On the market a daily repeated plebiscite of the consumers determines who should own and run the plants and the farms. Thus, private ownership of producers' goods turns into a public mandate, as it were, which is withdrawn as soon as the owners-the mandatories-no longer employ it for the best possible satisfaction of the wants of the public. ...

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