Encomienda

“ It will be better to send a rich advocate than a poor knight who as is suspected [267] is pledged by gifts and by the grant of a good repartimiento. This last point, however, I know only by hearsay. If it is true, your Excellency will ascertain it there and will judge if it is right that the encomienda should not be given to those who have been here in service nine years pacifying the country, and that it should be given to a man who came and goes back again with a good salary without having been engaged in the pacification and without any of the labor of conquest. ”

“ What has been already said in the preceding conclusions concerning the encomenderos likewise applies to the encomiendas which belong to the royal crown; for the king is under even greater obligation than are the encomenderos to provide his Indians with religious teaching; and to the same extent as they, he is bound to make restitution of all that has been unjustly collected. ”

“ The encomenderos declare that your Majesty should meet this expense, and are sending documents on the subject. I give this information in order that your Majesty may be assured that this is entirely an act of bounty on your Majesty’s part, and that your Majesty has many obligations and expenses on these islands, which must be met; and that since your Majesty gives the wine on the royal encomiendas, they can and should provide it on their own.
Your Majesty has commanded that no offices or places of profit shall be given to those who hold Indians in encomienda. ”

“ Inasmuch as certain men who already hold encomiendas in the said islands and have therein a sufficiency of what they need, are begging for further bounty, you are advised not to grant them anything more, until many others have been provided and rewarded with encomiendas and other posts and rewards. ”

“ As to his saying that your Majesty ordered me to remedy, with his help, these excesses in the collection of tributes, I responded that, only as regards the disaffected and never-pacified encomiendas, your Majesty orders me to communicate and confer with him, in these words: "I have heard that there has been and is disorder and misappropriation in the collection of the tributes from the disaffected or unpacified encomiendas," etc. Therefore your Majesty bids us to discuss no others except these, as in the others I shall correct the excesses. The only ones in doubt are those disaffected. ”

“ Well, if counsel has been given unto us to store up our grain, I should not wonder if there were temptations; placed before us, to induce us to non-compliance. High prices in silver and gold may be offered as an inducement. Men may come and say, I will give you a high price for your wheat: here are goods of every kind we will give for your grain." There, you perceive, is the temptation and the counsel before us. We should like the comforts of life, and would no doubt like to purchase them; but the counsel of the servants of the Lord would lead us to do differently. ”

“ Thus they all dealt with their possessions not otherwise than those who sit together at one table deal with the utensils of the table, which all use with equal right. Seeing this, I thought with shame that with us everything befalls in contrary fashion. Some fill and overfill their houses with utensils, clothing, food, gold, and silver, as much as they can; meanwhile others, who are equally servants of God, have hardly wherewith to clothe and feed themselves. ”

“ Such a business would have been impossible in the Middle Ages when a merchant accompanied his wares or shared his responsibilities with a few associates. It was made possible now by the development of the commission trade. Commission merchants, or factors, made it their profession “to buy and sell for other business men for a certain profit which is given them for their trouble by the principals.” Sometimes they were in business on their own account also; sometimes they were specialists in various lines. ”

“ They only inhabit the village at times of festas, or on the arrival of a merchant like Senhor L., when they bring any produce they may have to dispose of, or, if they have none, get what goods they can on credit, with the promise of payment at some future time. ”

“ If a husbandman may not think of the harvest, how shall he do the duties of the seed time? If the merchant may not fix on a mart nor make arrangements for sojourning there till he has disposed of his goods, nor count the number of days which the ship will require for transporting them, then how shall he know what wares to purchase? ”

“ Then she said to me, "You are the son of a merchant, so you must now engage in trade, and there is a rich merchant in this country called Viśákhila; he is in the habit of lending capital to poor men of good family, go and entreat him to give you something to start with." ”

“ But wilt thou now come down with me to the bazaar and sell thy goods? Belike with their price thou mayst buy thee wherewithal to traffic.” When I heard this, I was silent awhile for amazement and said in myself, “What mean these words and what goods have I?” Then said he, “O my son, be not troubled nor careful, but come with me, and if any offer thee what contenteth thee for thy goods, take it; but, if not, I will lay them up for thee in my storehouses, against a fitting occasion.” So I bethought me and said to myself, “Let us do his bidding and see what are these goods of which he speaks.” ”

“ These no-places of business, it is unnecessary to observe, are not located all in one quarter;—there is not a special colony of these monks of commerce, these nuns of trade, where the stricken harts of the vending world go weep in herds. ”

“ I have, therefore, gentlemen, renounced all speculative science. I have become a wool-comber, a dealer in pins and laces, hoping that I may one day attain wealth, and be also one of the first men in the town. ”

“ Constantly, on our way, we were beset by men, who wanted to guide us and act as intermediaries in trade. These fellows hang around the bazaars and make a living in two ways; they get a fee from the stranger and a commission from the merchant, and the commission is generally the most important of the two. It makes little difference whether you take them as interpreters, or hire a dragoman from the hotel; both will have a commission, and sometimes the dragoman is worse than the regular frequenter of the bazaars. ”

“ When we had effected an entrance I could see nothing of my armoire, my fauteuils, my tables; nothing, not a thing of the furniture that had been in my house, absolutely nothing, while the night before I could not take a step without encountering some article that had been mine.
The commissaire, in his bewilderment, at first looked at me distrustfully.
"Mon Dieu, monsieur," I said, "the disappearance of that furniture and that of the merchant form a strange coincidence."
He smiled. "It is true. You made a mistake in buying and paying for your bibelots yesterday. It put him on his guard." ”

“ The experience I soon gained taught me that the collectors of old pewter mainly belonged to that class with whom money is little object, and that what they strived to obtain were very old, unique pieces, communion vessels and historical specimens, quite out of the reach of an ordinary householder. ”

“ The present mode of lodging money in the commissioners' hands in England being, as they remark, "one to which emigrants may naturally feel some repugnance, as it is only reasonable to suppose that almost every person will he desirous to retain the disposal of his capital in his own hands until he can become personally conversant with the character of the country to which he is about to emigrate." ”

“ There are but few domestic functions which may be said to belong exclusively, on the one hand, to men, or, on the other, to women.
504 Out of the diversified domestic industry, as I have said, comes comparative prosperity. The home is all that the Seminole family needs or desires for its comfort. There is enough clothing, or the means to get it, for every one. Ordinarily more than a sufficient quantity of clothes is possessed by each member of a family. ”

“ And if a collector, seeing them, tries to collect the revenue, the gentry take the peasant’s part and send the collector away more dead than alive, and the government officers look on, and dare not interfere. ”

“ The Prince said to the merchant: "I am very glad to see you. I am always glad to see people who come from a far country; but what do you want of me?"
So the merchant told him all his story—how he had three daughters; how he had remembered to bring back the gifts which the two eldest had asked of him; and how he had forgotten the Golden Ring which he had promised to his youngest daughter, Daphne. ”

“ He made a collection which filled five large salons, and comprehended all the different sorts of cow-bells that ever had been contrived, save one. That one—an antique, and the only specimen extant—was possessed by another collector. My uncle offered enormous sums for it, but the gentleman would not sell. Doubtless you know what necessarily resulted. A true collector attaches no value to a collection that is not complete. His great heart breaks, he sells his hoard, he turns his mind to some field that seems unoccupied. ”

“ If they must have more, the encomenderos are not of so poor standing as not to have other relations and dealings by which they can increase their property and help to meet their expenses, in order that all the burden may not be laid upon the Indians ”

“ On their way, they happened on a beautiful garden; so they left the purse with a woman who kept the garden and entered. After they had walked about awhile and eaten and drunken and made merry, one of them said to the others, “I have with me scented fuller’s earth; come, let us wash our heads therewith in this running water.” Quoth another, “We lack a comb;” and a third, “Let us ask the keeper; belike she hath a comb.” Thereupon one of them arose and accosting the keeper, whereas his comrades could see him, but not hear what he said, said to her, “Give me the purse.” ”

“ The house of the lively old gentleman, whose eccentricity had led him to adopt the dress and the frugal habits of the natives, was neither clean or well kept, although he had a couple of friends to assist him in the business, a Scotchman, and a young Frenchman who had lived in the most refined Parisian society. ”

“ But in the mean time her own experience of life, let her see that any attempt however indirect, or disguis'd, to divert or break, at least presently, so strong a cement of hearts as ours was, could only end in losing two lodgers, of whom she made very competent advantages, if either of us came to smoak her commission, for a commission she had from one of her customers, either to debauch or get me away from my keeper at any rate. ”

“ Suppose the tradesman to be a warehouse-keeper, who trades by commission, and this person, being a clothier in the country, comes to offer him his business, the commission of which might have been worth to him thirty to forty or fifty pounds per annum ”

“ I pay what I know to be in great part an imposition, with an indulgent grin—I am in a hurry to get back to Mousmé, or might have argued the matter even in this heat—accept the offer of a coolie to carry my parcel for the equivalent of three-halfpence, and start to climb up the shady side of the rough-paved street to my home. ”

“ Having anticipated his future income by confirming for ready money certain leases granted by his father as tenant for life, and being baulked in hos expectation of an aunt's fortune by an informality in her will, he applied for a commission in the Spanish service in South America, but the friend who was to have obtained it for him inopportunely died. ”

“ Thus, suppose any person to be put in possession of a large estate of fruitful land, with rich beds of gold in its gravel, countless herds of cattle in its pastures; houses, and gardens, and storehouses full of useful stores; but suppose, after all, that he could get no servants? In order that he may be able to have servants, some one in his neighbourhood must be poor, and in want of his gold—or his corn. Assume that no one is in want of either, and that no servants are to be had. He must, therefore, bake his own bread, make his own clothes, plough his own ground, and shepherd his own flocks. ”

“ If her brothers shall not give her grain, oil, and wool, according to the value of her share, and shall not content her heart, she may let her field and garden unto any tenant she pleases and her tenant shall maintain her. ”

“ Because of increasing facilities of exchange he can sell his surplus and purchase the goods that will satisfy his other needs. The farmer's wife no longer spins and weaves the family's supply of clothing; the men buy their supply at the store and often even she turns over the task of making up her own gowns to the village dressmaker. ”

“ Evidence from various countries and times shows that periodic gatherings for religious rites, or other public purposes, furnish opportunities for buying and selling, which are habitually utilized; and this connection between the assembling of many people and the exchanging of commodities, which first shows itself at intervals, becomes a permanent connection where many people become permanently assembled—where a town grows up in the neighborhood of a temple, or around a stronghold, or in a place where local circumstances favor some manufacture. ”

“ I remember little more of what I saw or heard yesterday, except that my uncle remarked as we passed a sheep-walk in our drive home, what an astonishing number of people combine their labours to produce any one manufacture, and how necessary the different trades are to each other. ”

“ One day in the market the merchant bought another slave, a young man, handsome and well mannered, and took him to his house, and kept him there with his family and the other slaves. The young man was earnest and careful in his work, and the merchant approved of him, and his fellow-slaves liked him. ”