350 HALL’S EXCURSIONS. 
task. At mid-day their wives bring their miserable pittances 
of food, after which the doors are again closed on them. At 
nightfall the overseer enters to collect their tasks. "Those 
who have been unable to conclude them are chastened by the 
overseers, without hearing reasons or excuses, with lashes by 
the hundred, for this is their only mode of reckoning them, 
and are left shut up in the prison; and although the whole 
building is nothing else, there is always one room with stocks 
for their more peculiar and more barbarous punishment. 
During the day the master and his overseers make frequent 
visits, when the least symptom of neglect is punished in the 
same manner, with stripes, which are repeated in the evening 
when the task is delivered. This punishment is the more’ 
cruel, as they are not the less compelled to pay from their 
earnings the deficiency in their daily labour; and as the debt 
goes on increasing from year to year, it furnishes a pretext 
to the master to enslave not only the Indian but all his 
family. The consequence of this barbarous treatment is, 
that the Indians quickly fall sick, partly from this repeated - 
punishment, and partly from the bad quality of their food. 
The hardest hearts would be moved to see them brought out | 
dead and already reduced to skeletons; for the greater part 
of them die with their tasks in their hands.”—p. 270—280, 
Spanish Edition. 
Upon such a system was built the manufacturing prosperity 
of Quito, destroyed in great part by the freedom of commerce, 
and still regretted by most of the proprietors of the country. 
Let us now quote from the Uiloas the benefits the Indians 
have derived from the introduction of Christianity. 
** As soon as these curates take possession of their churches 
they commonly bend all their efforts towards amassing wealth, 
for which purpose they have invented a variety of practices, 
by means of which to extort from the Indians the little that 
might escape from the grasp of the Corregidors. One of 
these is the practice of brotherhoods, which are so numerous 
in every village that the churches are full of saints, each of 
which presides over a brotherhood; and, in order that the 
