222 LOCAL AUTHORITIES. Chap. XTII. 



togetlier in a promiscuous way ; pigs and fowls wandering 

 over the floor at early dawn. The Juez de Paz, Francisco 

 Farfan, administers justice in such a place as this, lounging on 

 a sort of mud-platform at one end of the room, where his bed 

 is made up, while the culprit, and a crowd of alcaldes and 

 spectators, stand before him. Every one chatters at the same 

 time for about ten minutes, and the prisoner is sent to 

 the lock-up. The Jueces de Paz have to render periodical 

 accounts of all their cases, attested by witnesses, to the Juez 

 de Primera Instancia in the capital of the province. 



While upon the subject of these local authorities, it will 

 be well to give an account of the powers placed in their 

 hands by the Constitution of 1856, by which Peru is now 

 governed; both because the measures then adopted will, 

 I believe, have a lasting and beneficial effect on the people, 

 and because the persons so vested with power endeavoured 

 to display their patriotic zeal by throwing obstacles in my 

 way. By this constitution it was provided that in the capital 

 of each department there should be a Junta Departmental^ 

 the members of which should be elected in the same way 

 and with the same qualifications as those for the National 

 Congress, to meet every year. These Juntas were to deli- 

 berate and legislate for the advancement and material progress 

 of the departments, their decrees being null if contrary to any 

 law of Congress. The evident objection to this measure is its 

 tendency to split the country up into small communities with 

 separate interests, which has always proved to be most 

 disastrous in thinly-peopled and half-civilized states. This 

 view is taken in a very able article on the constitution, in a 

 periodical published at Lima, where the Juntas Departmentales 

 are declared to be the initiation of a system of " federation," 

 the result of which has always been to dismember countries 



3 Titiilo 14, s. 104. 



