Page:Letters of Cortes to Emperor Charles V - Vol 1.djvu/57

Rh fined to men who find themselves cut adrift from the usual restraints of civilised society, isolated and paramount amidst barbarians, whose inferior moral standard provides constant and easy temptations to lapse, and, while it were as difficult as it is unnecessary to attempt a defence of the excesses which the Spaniards undoubtedly committed in Mexico, it is equally impossible to condemn them as exceptional. Commenting upon the strange contradiction between professed piety, and practised vice and cruelty, Prescott writes: "When we see the hand, red with the blood of the wretched native, raised to invoke the blessing of heaven, we experience something like a sensation of disgust, and a doubt of its sincerity." The distinguished historian here voices a facile assumption all too common amongst many who, lacking his luminous comprehension of the spirit of that age, commit the injustice of measuring the acts of its men by the more humane standards of our own times. He himself acquits Cortes of the imputation of insincerity, and declares that no one who reads his correspondence, or studies the events of his career, can doubt that he would have been the first to lay down his life for the Faith. Too many barriers, however, interposed between the Anglo-Saxon protestant historian of the nineteenth century and the Spanish Catholicism of the sixteenth to allow even one of his superior historical acumen to accurately appreciate the operation of religious influences on the character of such a man as Fernando Cortes, whose military conquest was prompted in a large measure by genuinely religious motives, but whose fervent practice of the Church's teachings unfortunately alternated with lapses into grievous sensuality.

Whatever else may be doubted, the religious sincerity, and martial courage of Fernando Cortes are above impeachment. He was a stranger to hypocrisy which is a smug vice of cowards and if his reasons for acts of policy, which cost many lives, may be deplored by the humane,