NOTE TO THE CHAPTER ON THE CONDITION OF THE PEOPLE
Writers on Peruvian civilisation from the time of Robertson and Prescott have assumed that the whole fabric was originated and matured by the Incas, constructed, as it were, out of chaos. But a more recent school of thinkers has seen the impossibility of such a creation, and holds that the Incas systematised tribal and social organisations which had existed from remote antiquity, and did not create them.
A very able review of the works of those writers who have adopted the opinion that the Incas did not create a system, but adapted one which had long been in existence, was published at Lima in 1908—'El Peru antiguo y los modernos sociologos.' The author, Victor Andres Belaunde, is thoroughly master of his subject. He first explains the conclusions of the German sociologist Cunow, in his 'Organisation of the Empire of the Incas—Investigations into their Ancient Agrarian Communism.' According to Cunow there had existed, from remote antiquity, separate groups organised on the same base as the village communities of India, and the German mark. These were the ayllus. He holds that the ayllus, as village communities, existed before the empire of the Incas. The Incas respected this ayllu organisation, and all they did was to systematise it. Belaunde holds that this hypothesis has caused a complete revolution in the manner of considering the rule of the Incas. The communistic organisation did not originate in the constitution of the Inca monarchy, but was anterior to it. Communism was not here the result of a special political organisation, nor the realisation of a plan of state socialism. It was simply the result of the union of the numerous ayllus, who thus
