Page:Economic History of Virginia Vol 2.djvu/76

 a land of idolatry to a land in which Christianity prevailed, a service had been conferred upon the whole African race. As late as the end of the seventeenth century, the belief was held by many, even in England, that the negro was not a man but a wild beast, marked by an intelligence hardly superior to that of a monkey, and with instincts and habits far more debased. He was considered to be stupid in mind, savage in manners, and brutal in his impulses, and the multitudes that were transported across the ocean justified the apparent harshness of this judgment. It was an age, however, in which little mercy was shown to the lower races by the higher, unless the lower were in a position to inflict injury upon the higher. The Caribs in the West Indian Islands had swiftly melted away under the stress of the unaccustomed tasks which were imposed upon them. The Englishman of the seventeenth century was in no way as cruel as the Spaniard of the sixteenth, but it is not improbable that if the Indian tribes of Virginia had been as mild and tractable in their disposition as their fellows in the islands of the Spanish Main, they would at first have been brought under a yoke at best heavy and exacting. The consideration which the aborigines received from the English settlers was due in the largest measure perhaps, not to a sense of justice and humanity, which, as we have seen, was far from lacking, but to a well-founded apprehension of the savage courage and the restless spirit of the natives.