Functions of the Gods. 73 



that our world has ever known, of the crushing of the 

 gentle Indian race there by chains, by imprison- 

 ment, shut out from the glorious Sun whose children 

 their Incas were. Too gentle to struggle, accustomed 

 only to a life of flowers, of music, and of sunshine, 

 they were crammed into caves that they were made 

 to dig in ancient cliffs, dying by thousands upon 

 thousands in the digging out of the gold and silver 

 which their Spanish conquerors demanded, until the 

 very name of the ancient nation perished, and only a 

 few scattered Peruvian Indians remained to repre- 

 sent what was one of the fairest civilisations of the 

 world. Such was the karma made by Spain in 

 the days of her glory, and the horror of her conquests 

 sank into the oblivion of the past. But do the Gods 

 forget ? Nay, their memory is perfect. They are 

 the administrators of the divine law, and give the 

 harvest to the sowers. From the very country which 

 they outraged, from the very land that they con- 

 quered, a new nation springs up as the centuries go 

 on to take up the old struggle between the two 

 hemispheres, and to-day we have seen America and 

 Spain closing again in the death-grip, but the scale 

 of balance is now weighed down on the other side, 

 and America becomes the karmic agent for working 

 out the woes of the Aztecs and the Peruvians, and 

 for driving from the western hemisphere the nation 



