The Andes of southern Peru . ble labor on the part of the dejected peons whomust gather them after a days heavy work with the packs. Overcoming these enormous difficulties is expensive and someone must pay the bill. As is usual in a pioneer region, the nativelaborer pays a large part of it in unrequited toil; the rest is paidby the rubber consumer. For this is one of the cases where adirect road connects the civilized consumer and the barbarous pro-ducer. What a story it could tell if a ball of smoke-cured rubberon a New York dock were endowed with speech—of the wet junglepath, of enslaved peo
The Andes of southern Peru . ble labor on the part of the dejected peons whomust gather them after a days heavy work with the packs. Overcoming these enormous difficulties is expensive and someone must pay the bill. As is usual in a pioneer region, the nativelaborer pays a large part of it in unrequited toil; the rest is paidby the rubber consumer. For this is one of the cases where adirect road connects the civilized consumer and the barbarous pro-ducer. What a story it could tell if a ball of smoke-cured rubberon a New York dock were endowed with speech—of the wet junglepath, of enslaved peons, of vile abuses by immoral agents, of allthe toil and sickness that make the tropical lowland a reproach! In the United States the specter of slavery haunted the na-tional conscience almost from the beginning of national life, andthe ghost was laid only at the cost of one of the bloodiest wars inhistory. In other countries, as in sugar-producing Brazil, thefreeing of the slaves meant not a war but the verge of financial. Fig. 19.
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1900, bookdecade1910, bookidandeso, booksubjectgeology
