Page:A general history for colleges and high schools (Myers, 1890).djvu/581

Rh of the Peruvian empire filled with splendid temples and palaces, but throughout the country were magnificent works of public utility, such as roads, bridges, and aqueducts. The government of the Incas, the royal, or ruling race, was a mild, parental autocracy.

Glowing reports of the enormous wealth of the Incas,—the commonest articles in whose palaces, it was asserted, were of solid gold, reached the Spaniards by way of the Isthmus of Darien, and it was not long before an expedition was organized for the conquest of the country. The leader of the band was Francisco Pizarro, an iron-hearted, perfidious, and illiterate adventurer.

Through treachery, Pizarro made a prisoner of the Inca Atahualpa. The captive offered, as a ransom for his release, to fill the room in which he was confined "as high as he could reach" with vessels of gold. Pizarro accepted the offer, and the palaces and temples throughout the empire were stripped of their golden vessels, and the apartment was filled with the precious relics. The value of the treasure is estimated at over $17,000,000. When this vast wealth was once under the control of the Spaniards, they seized it all, and then treacherously put the Inca to death (1533). With the death of Atahualpa the power of the Inca dynasty passed away forever.

Spanish Colonization in the New World.—Not until more than one hundred years after the discovery of the Western Hemisphere by Columbus, was there established a single permanent English settlement within the limits of what is now the United States, the portion of the New World destined to be taken possession of by the peoples of Northern Europe, and to become the home of civil and religious freedom.

But into those parts of the new lands opened up by Spanish exploration and conquest there began to pour at once a tremendous stream of Spanish adventurers and colonists, in search of fortune and fame. It was a sort of Spanish migration. The movement might be compared to the rush of population from the Eastern States to California, after the announcement of the