Page:Colonization and Christianity.djvu/182

 you;' dashing upon him what remained in the basin. Without delay he resumed his jokes, and in the midst of them the man expired."

We must now quit South America, to follow the European Christians in their colonial career in another quarter of the globe. And in thus taking leave of this immense portion of the New World, where such cruelties have been perpetrated, and so much innocent blood shed by the avarice and ambition of Europe, we may ask,—What has been done by way of atonement; or what is the triumph of civilization? We have already quoted Mr. Ward on the present state of the aborigines of Mexico, and Mr. Luccock on those of Rio Janeiro. Baron Humboldt can furnish the reader with ample indications of a like kind in various parts of South America. Maria Graham tells us, so recently as 1824, that in Chili, Peru, and the provinces of La Plata, the system of Spain, which had driven those realms to revolt, had diffused "sloth and ignorance" as their necessary consequences. That in Brazil, "the natives had been either exterminated or wholly subdued. The slave-hunting, which had been systematic on the first occupation of the land, and more especially after the discovery of the mines, had so diminished the wretched Indians, that the introduction of negroes was deemed necessary: they now people the Brazilian fields; and if here and there an Indian aldea is to be found, the people are wretched, with less than negro comforts, and much less than negro spirit or industry: the Indians are nothing in Brazil."

That the system of exterminating the Indians has been continued to the latest period where any re-