The reducción of the Indians: the crown's jurist defends compulsory resettlement and records its cost

Gathering scattered native peoples into fixed towns — reducción in Peru, congregación in New Spain — gave them self-governing towns with churches, magistrates and common land, and bound them there by force for tribute and labour. Juan de Solórzano Pereira, a judge of the Council of the Indies, gave the policy its fullest legal defence in one chapter of his Política Indiana — and there quoted a friar who wept its harm, granted the fleeing Indian was scarcely at fault, and held its land protected.