Page:Colonization and Christianity.djvu/159

 remain, and to be treated like slaves, or fly to the woods, and take their chance as savages."

Here we must close our review of the Spaniards in the New World. Our narrative has been necessarily brief and rapid, for the history of their crimes extends over a vast continent, and through three centuries; and would, related at length, fill a hundred volumes. We have found them, however, everywhere the same—cruel, treacherous, and regardless of the feelings of humanity and the sense of justice. They have wreaked alike their vengeance on the natives of every country they have entered, and on those of their own race who dared to espouse the cause of the sufferers. This spirit continued to the last. In all their colonies, the natives, whether of Indian blood, or the Creoles descended of their own, were carefully excluded from the direction of their own affairs, and the emoluments of office. Spaniards from the mother country were sent over in rapacious swarms, to fatten on the vitals of these vast states, and return when they had sucked their fill. The retribution has followed; and Spain has not now left a single foot of all these countries which she has drenched in the blood, and filled with the groans of their native children.

Mr. Ward, in his "Mexico in 1827," says that in 1803, the number of Indians remaining in Mexico was two millions and a half; but that their history is everywhere a blank. Some have become habituated to civil life, and are excellent artizans, but the greater portion are totally neglected. That, during the Revolution, the sense of the injuries which the race had received from the Spaniards, and which seemed to have slumbered in their