Latin America Author:William R. Shepherd Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: half of the eighteenth century, when the work was completed. From 1763 onward the office of viceroy was definitely established, and the seat of government fixed ... more »at Rio de Janeiro. The captains general, in charge of the separate provinces, frequently evinced a marked spirit of independence toward their superior. The people of the various captaincies, similarly, did not hesitate to oppose, whenever they could do so, any interference on the part of the central authority in purely local concerns. Given the circumstances under which many of the provinces had been originally founded, added to the lax administration of the mother country in general, it is not strange that the relations among them should have been much closer than was possible in the case of the Spanish colonies. CHAPTER III SOCIAL ORGANIZATION Among the numerous groups of aborigines in the New World the grade of civilization ranged from utter savagery up to a superior sort of barbarism. The lowest in the scale were nomads and cannibals. Others, like the virile Araucanians of Chile or the gentler Guaranis of Paraguay, carried on a rude kind of agriculture, and dwelt in more orless permanent communities. Some of the natives had even made remarkable progress in the institutions of an orderly life. To the relatively civilized class belonged the inhabitants of the cooler regions of the highlands extending from central Mexico to southern Peru. Typical of them were the loose confederation of tribes under the Aztecs and the mass of natives who submitted to the yoke of the Incas. Both had built upon foundations laid by peoples of a culture higher than then- own, and of an origin altogether obscure. Externally at least, with its potentates, priests, nobles, commoners, serfs and slaves, the social system of the Aztec...« less