Page:Colonization and Christianity.djvu/80

 those of any other. Here were those fairy and most interesting kingdoms as suddenly assaulted and subdued by two daring adventurers with a mere handful of followers; and as suddenly destroyed! Their young civilization, their fair and growing fabric of policy, ruthlessly dashed down and utterly annihilated; their princes murdered in cold blood; their wealth dissipated like a morning dream; and their swarming people crushed into slaves, or swept from their cities and their fair fields, as a harvest is swept away by the sickle!

It is difficult, amid the intoxication of the imagination on contemplating such a spectacle,—for there is nothing like it in the history of the whole world—it is difficult, dazzled by military triumph, and seduced by the old sophisms of glory and adventure, to bring the mind steadily to contemplate the real nature and consequences of these events. The names of Cortez and Pizarro, indeed, through all the splendour of that renown with which the acclamations of their interested cotemporaries, and the false morality of their historians have surrounded them, still retain the gloom and terror of their cruelties. But this is derived rather from particular acts of outrageous atrocity, than from a just estimate of the total villany and unrighteous nature of their entire undertakings. Their entrance, assault, and subduction of the kingdoms of Mexico and Peru, were from first to last, in limine et in termino, the acts of daring robbers, on flame with the thirst of gold, and of a spurious and fanatical renown,—setting at defiance every sentiment of justice, mercy and right, and bound by no scruples of honour or conscience, in the pursuit of