Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/43

Rh with the cunning, the greed, the violence, the ruthless and unpitying vengeance, and the steady havoc of war which have made the red men yield all but their last refuges, on an almost boundless continent, to the white man. But none the less are there witnesses, memorials, and full confirmations of the fact that the Indian has had his friends and benefactors among the whites. Always, and with bright and gracious tributes for sincerity and gentle humanity, must the name of Isabella of Castile be reverently honored, because, while her own royal consort, her nobles, her people, and even many of her highest ecclesiastics, indifferent to the subject, — either from thoughtlessness over the first signs of a stupendous iniquity that was to follow, or from absorption in prospective ambitions or commercial interests, — connived from the first in the enslavement, oppression, and destruction of the natives of the New World, she was the first of women or of men to protest, as a Christian, against any spoiling of the heathen. Nor was it from a mere feminine tenderness that she pleaded and wrote with such constraining earnestness that the children of Nature, as we shall soon read, described so engagingly by Columbus, should be treated with all the more of Christian love and mercy because, not being Christians, this was the only way to make them Christians. Of all European sovereigns, Isabella alone wrought from the dictation of the heart, and not with merely mocking formalities of profession in behalf of the savages. To the close of her life, in deep afflictions and in bodily sufferings, and in dictating her last wishes and commands, that saintly queen pleaded for gentle pity and for Christian equity and love in behalf of her subjects of a strange race. One of her ecclesiastics caught her spirit; others of them gave their counsel for measures which thwarted her purposes.

The President and Council of the Virginia Plantation in 1606 were instructed “to kindly treat the savages and heathen people in those parts, and use all proper