Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Slavery volume 5 .djvu/260

248 Community, and Family, of the middle ages. He hated arts, letters, liberty; even the mass of the people seemed to care nothing for freedom of body or of mind. The Spaniard settled in the fairest parts of the new-found land, amongst tribes already far advanced toward civilization—the world’s foremost barbarians. He slew them with merciless rapacity; took their stone-built cities: occupied their land better tilled than the gardens of Castile; he seized their abundant gold; stole their wives and their maidens. At home the people were wonted to bull-fights, wherein the valiant Matador risks his own worthless body, and to Autos da Fe, where the cowardly priests burn their freethinking sister without hazarding their own nuisance of a life; in America the Spaniard rioted in the murder of men. The pictured horrors of De Bry report only a drop of the blood so torturously shed; yet two hundred and fifty years ago they terrified all Europe—Latin, German, French, English, Dutch.

To America, Spain transferred the superstition and tyranny of mediaeval Europe, its four-fold despotism, ecclesiastical, political, social, domestic. She reinvented negro slavery. Six thousand years ago, before the "flood," yea, before mythological Cain had been conceived by a Hebrew head, Egypt, it seems, was guilty of this crime. In the middle ages negro slavery was an art well nigh lost. Spain, first of the Christian nations, enforced religion with the knife, and beheaded men for heresy; she rolled the Inquisition as a sweet morsel under her tongue; her sovereigns, who extinguished the brand which smoked on the national hearth yet warm with Gothic liberty, who butchered the Moors and banished the plundered Jews, were for such services styled "the Catholic!" Spain re-annexed negro slavery to herself, and therewith stained the soil of America. Therein she broke not the continuity of her history, the succession of rapine, piracy, cruel outpouring of blood. Not Italian Columbus, but Iberian Cortes and Pizarro, were the types of Spain ; not Las Casas, but Torquemada.

Behold now the condition of Spanish America. Its most flourishing part is an empire, with the house of Braganza at its head—an imitation of the old world, a despotism throned on bayonets. There are two empires in Tropic