486 



GENERAL OBSERVATIONS. 



insatiately at too much, she has lost all ; for I 

 do not see the remotest chance of the mother- 

 country regaining a permanent footing in 

 South America. 



Many of the villages of this country afford, 

 too often, pictures of human misery and 

 wretchedness, w^hich it is next to impossible 

 to conceive. One of the worst features I have 

 observed in the character of the lower and 

 more numerous class of the natives, is, that 

 they appear contented with the abject misery 

 in which they live. There is no elasticity, no 

 spring. Humiliated by the privations and 

 abuses to which they have been subjected un- 

 der the Spanish government, and partaking in a 

 peculiar degree of that extreme docility of dis- 

 position, which they inherit from their Indian 

 ancestors, they have nothing of that air of inde- 

 pendence, of that insolence (if I may be allow- 

 ed the word) which in other countries usually 

 denotes the consciousness of being free. 



To remedy these defects, to inspire the 

 people with a desire to turn the advantages of 

 their soil and climate to their own advance- 

 ment, is, I imagine, practicable only by means 

 of the rising generation ; and the first step to 



