case of all four until less than a score of years ago, was a prime consideration. Each town is measurably self-contained with adequate agricultural tracts tributary to it. Each is in a state of culture that leads it to look outside rather than to a neigh- boring center for the imports it desires to obtain. This self- sufficiency is no less true in a political or a social sense than in a business one. The intermarriage of prominent and influ- ential families is a natural consequence of the lack of social communication with the world outside the town or the valley or the region. Having a large native Indian population that furnished a labor substratum, a fairly well balanced and sat- isfactory life had been developed that increased the independ- ence which a pioneer condition had fixed in the character of the people. Since the beginning of Bolivian history there has been a marked rivalry between the four principal towns to influence government and to maintain an autonomous condi- tion.
In Peru revolutions have frequently started in Arequipa, Abancay, Cuzco, and elsewhere in the interior where a high degree of self-sufficiency and a regional consciousness and family interrelationships have worked powerfully through successive generations. Early in 1911 Cuzco and Abancay were both the scene of revolutionary fighting, and the latter city was besieged until government forces succeeded in captur- ing the principal body of insurgents. I had one of them as a guide during a part of my journey across the Western Cordil- lera of Peru in that year and from him learned many interesting things regarding the point of view of the insurgents, the his- tory of the fighting, and his own detention in a government prison at Arequipa from which he had escaped but a short time before. It was not merely grievances against the government, it was also the fact that they were young men in search of adventure that welded the band together and led to military resistance against the powers that were. In the house of the Prefect of the Department of Abancay, Sefiior Gonzales showed me how he managed the affairs of his department and, point- ing to the telegraph instrument and to a group of his soldiers outside, told me that there were the two chief means of govern-
