| Sumario: | The article focuses Indians settled in Andean America. The peoples of the present Andean States are to a large extent political heirs of the great empire of the Incas. Just as the inhabitants of various portions of the Roman Empire gradually achieved sufficient national unity to forge the modern States found there today, so, in Andean America, the people are still in the process of creating national unity. The Inca way of life was autochthonous to the mountain-girdled plateaus on which it had developed, and the Incas had no concept of private property in the modern Anglo-Saxon sense of those words. The nineteenth century was one of upheaval and turmoil for various reasons. The Andean States had developed no middle class, although the class of mestizos, with more or less Indian blood in their veins, had gradually come into being. But class differences in the Indo-Latin countries have always tended to be based on wealth and rank rather than on race. The psychological aspect of the lack of integration of the Andean Indian into modern economic life should not be overlooked. The Indian has understood and practiced passive resistance for over four hundred years, and it looks as if he might triumph in the end.
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