THE RUBBER FORESTS 25 



ruin besides a fundamental change in the social order and prob- 

 lems as complex and wearisome as any that war can bring. 

 Everywhere abolition was secured at frightful cost. 



The spirit that upheld the new founders of the western repub- 

 lics in driving out slavery was admirable, but as much cannot be 

 said of their work of reconstruction. We like to pass over those 

 dark days in our own history. In South America there has lin- 

 gered from the old slave-holding days down to the present, a labor 

 system more insidious than slavery, yet no less revolting in its de- 

 tails, and infinitely more difficult to stamp out. It is called 

 peonage ; it should be called slavery. In Bolivia, Peru, and Brazil 

 it flourishes now as it ever did in the fruitful soil of the interior 

 provinces where law and order are bywords and where the scarcity 

 of workmen will long impel men to enslave labor when they can- 

 not employ it. Peonage is slavery, though as in all slave systems 

 there are many forms under which the system is worked out. We 

 commonly think that the typical slave is one who is made to work 

 hard, given but little food, and at the slightest provocation is tied 

 to a post and brutally whipped. This is indeed the fate of many 

 slaves or "peons" so-called, in the Amazon forests; but it is no 

 more the rule than it was in the South before the war, for a peon 

 is a valuable piece of property and if a slave raider travel five 

 hundred miles through forest and jungle-swamp to capture an 

 Indian you may depend upon it that he will not beat him to death 

 merely for the fun of it. 



That unjust and frightfully cruel floggings are inflicted at 

 times and in some places is of course a result of the lack of official 

 restraint that drunken owners far from the arm of the law some- 

 times enjoy. When a man obtains a rubber concession from the 

 government he buys a kingdom. Many of the rubber territories 

 are so remote from the cities that officials can with great difficulty 

 be secured to stay at the customs ports. High salaries must be 

 paid, heavy taxes collected, and grafting of the most flagrant kind 

 winked at. Often the concessionaire himself is chief magistrate 

 of his kingdom by law. Under such a system, remote from all 

 civilizing influences, the rubber producer himself oftentimes a law- 



