MASTERS AND SLAVES.

II

themselves toiling for others on the fields that were once their own, wearing out their miserable lives in the mines from which these greedy masters extracted the means of ease and pleasure, and perishing by hundreds under burdens which the stronger Spaniards would not touch with their little finger while one woman or child was able to crawl under their lash. It is a fearful story of wrongs, tortures, and sufferings. If we forget what human nature is capable of when it gives way to its evil passions, and read the accounts of writers who saw with their own eyes what was then done in that fair and rich region of earth, we may ask ourselves with a shudder if these Spaniards were not indeed beings of another sphere, fiends rather than men! The very cannibals, we are told, were known to loathe the flesh of these monsters in human shape.

The Spanish government, it should be remembered, showed more regard for the welfare of the Indians. But it found itself unable to oversee or control the proceedings of those who were on the spot. Besides, it was poor, and had no means of rewarding the conquerors except by allowing them to have their will of the lands and liberty of the conquered. Humane and pious scruples as to this wholesale enslavement were fitfully and doubtfully entertained at the court; and from time to time. regulations were made to check the frightful atrocities of which some news did not fail to reach home, though the pious Isabella and the enlightened ministers of Charles V. could not easily learn the full truth. The colonists were ordered to treat the

Indians kindly, as if a bloodhound let loose inte the woods could be expected to fawn upon its exhausted prey. The masters who were making Laste to be rich were admonished not to overwork their slaves. It was declared that only the Caribs, accused of cannibalism, and such Indians as might be taken in war, should be reduced to slavery. Negroes were transported from Africa to work for the white men; strange to say, even the humanity of the age seldom scrupled about the lawfulness of holding the sons of Canaan in bondage. Such regulations, however, were constantly disobeyed or evaded by the cupidity of the colonists. At the best, they would regard no more than the letter of their sovereign's injunctions. When they wanted slaves, and no wars were going on in which slaves might lawfully be made, they did not hesitate to march upon some peaceful tribe, with whom they began proceedings by reading the royal proclamation setting forth that there was one God, one Pope, and one King of Castile, and requiring all people to give their assent thereto on pain of war. The puzzled and alarmed natives were probably unable at once to understand or to embrace these strange doctrines, so abruptly presented to them; and this Riot Act, so to speak, having been read, it was considered lawful to commence firing, and the unfortunate people were without further forms put to death on the spot, or made prisoners for a bondage in which death was only more slow, scarcely less sure, if indeed they did not choose to be consumed in the flames of their home, taking this for a more mer

THE CRUELTIES OF THE CONQUISTADORES. 13

ciful fate than the swords and chains of the Spaniards. Millions are said to have perished thus. Whole families committed suicide, to escape their miserable lives; whole tribes died under their cruel tasks; whole islands were depopulated. Human life was held so cheap that when a gang of slaves were going along, fastened together by a chain, and one fell exhausted on the ground, his head would be cut off as the speediest way of setting the chain free and letting the rest move on without loss of time. In half a century from the time when the first colony arrived in Hispaniola or St. Domingo, its natives, two millions in number, had almost entirely disappeared, their places being filled up by negroes, more hardened to labour and more humbled to bondage.

The same tale is to be told wherever the Spaniards spread themselves like a pestilence, now hanging up thirteen poor wretches in honour of Christ and His apostles (a pious jest!); here calling by the name of the Holy Cross a town the foundations of which were wet with human blood; there founding a church to the Blessed Mother of Mercy amidst human groans and cries that might have made a very image weep. To this day one village of Spanish America will bear the name of some meek and reverend saint, while its neighbour is still remembered as Matanza, the place of slaughter. The white men who professed such horror at the human sacrifices of Mexico yet shrank not from turning whole cities and nations into a hecatomb on the altar of their greed. Need we wonder that

the ignorant savages had small desire to seek t heaven in which they were urged to meet suc Christians, a heaven in which they might sti have prayers whipped from them at the churc doors, and be tortured and robbed to furnish offer ings to the Saviour, whose name was such a mocker in their ears! It is said that the slaves of a certai Spaniard were about to kill themselves in a body but preferred to live when their master threatened to hang himself, so that he might accompany them

into the next world.

These cruel conquerors were often good Catholics, according to their notions of religion; and we are not to be too hasty, judging by another standard, in looking upon them as hypocrites when they boasted of their devotion to the church and their zeal for the conversion of the heathen. We may know that God can only be worshipped in spirit and in truth; in these days it was too commonly believed, even by good men, that salvation depended on a mechanical operation of the sacraments. It was not thought to the purpose to make these poor Indians more intelligent, more self restraining, more capable of apprehending the truth; the work of the missionary was rather to force them to renounce one slavish superstition for another. The main point was to have them marked with the sign of the cross as a charm which should conjure the devil out of their hearts. For this kind of conversion, force seemed naturally a better instrument than reason. If the benighted sinners were not instantly convinced, and hesitated to receive the baptism of water,