ment in his country and they would continue to be the means until some future day when railway lines, a better government, the fuller exploitation of Peruvian resources, and the general education of his people had risen to the point where a solid nation could be developed and its unity assured.
We commonly think of battles as the conflict of armies merely, instead of realizing that they represent also the con- flict of ideas and of environments. Every group of people that has been organized in an environment that isolates them measurably from the rest of the country has certain local and immediate needs which it can satisfy, and it has certain outside needs which can only be satisfied by a central government, either because they call for an outlay of capital upon a scale larger than the local group can obtain or because other groups are involved whose needs must also be taken into account. These outside needs that can be satisfied by government only furnish the chief source of dissatisfaction in every loosely organized society spread out and scattered over an undevelopd country. To the man at Abancay government may mean just one thing—the source of power that can build a railroad to furnish him an outlet for his sugar and brandy to the markets of the coast and the streams of ocean commerce. When gov- ernment does not give him this one thing, he thinks it a very poor affair; and when he revolts, it is not to carry out some well-thought-out or lofty or cherished plan of his own but simply to protest against the failure of the government to give him the one thing that he asks and that seems so easy for it to grant.
It is no light task to get such a man to understand that the very conditions that have led to his kind of logic prevent the central government, even with the best of intentions and the most intelligent direction of affairs, from accomplishing very much in a few years. ‘The handicaps are too great; for above and beyond the scattered nature of the settlements, the towns, the mines, the ports, the railways, the isolated basins and valleys, the dividing influence of the relief and the climate of the plateaus and mountain ranges is largely responsible for the provincial points of view of the leaders in the several scattered
