Page:Letters of Cortes to Emperor Charles V - Vol 2.djvu/244

 encomienda of Indians, with whom to work the lands granted them. Cortes seems to have been sincerely opposed to the system from the outset, and to have yielded to the general clamour, only after having presented other projects which were refused; nor does he seem to have ever reconciled his conscience to it, although, once his sanction had been given, he defended it on the usual grounds of its expediency, even going so far as to withhold the publication of a royal decree which the friars had obtained from the Emperor, revoking all repartimientos and encomiendas already conceded, and forbidding new ones under severest penalties in the future. He defended this action by writing to the Emperor that to execute the decree would be to throw the Indians back into barbarism, ruin the colony, and drive the colonists out of the country.

The bishops and friars in Mexico energetically repudiated this idea, and in writing to the Emperor, in 1528, during the governorship of Nuño de Guzman, who was striving to obtain the royal approval of encomiendas, the Franciscans of Mexico expressed themselves as follows: "The proposal of the Governor and his auditors, suggested to them by the holders of encomiendas in New Spain, that the natives should be so held for their own welfare, their conversion to the faith, and their obedience to the King, is nothing else but the using of religion as a pretext to enable them to continue their tyranny as heretofore. When have these impious men ever had a thought of converting these people? or of treating them humanely? We have been witnesses of the methods of these holders of encomiendas for the last five years, and we have seen that their vexatious torments seem to have for their object the destruction of the Indians, and from these we may infer how much more cruel they were in the other three years after the conquest. By a special providence of God they have not succeeded, even with all the means they have used, in destroying the Mexicans. To wish to make slaves of the natives of the New World in order to subject them to the Faith and the King's obedience, is undoubtedly iniquitous, and God has forbidden men all abominations, even though the greatest good should result from them. Sacrifice is never acceptable if offered with unclean hands. It were a lesser evil if not a single inhabitant of the New World were ever converted to our Holy Faith, and that the King's sovereignty should be lost forever, than that these people should be brought to the one or the other by slavery" (Fr. Andres Calvo, Apud Bustamante).

The Empress, when she was regent, was moved to tears by one such relation as this; royal decrees without number were repeatedly issued, not merely to correct the abuses, but to suppress the system itself; but by intrigue and every sort of subterfuge, rapacious conquerors and greedy colonists would wrench concessions from the unwilling sovereigns which, as soon as the real state of things became known, would be promptly revoked. Open violation of the law was common, and winked at by the local authorities, only the bishops and friars