Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/74

54 and complacent this assumption may seem to us, it had so culminated in its conclusion, had become so imbedded in general belief, and was so unchallenged, that it was held as a self-evident truth. The Pope was the vicegerent of God, and the depositary of supreme power over men.

All that we have had to rehearse of the relentless and shocking barbarities inflicted on our aborigines by Spanish invaders as disciples and champions of the Roman Church, in their dealings with heathen, stands wholly free from any sectarian Protestant prejudices. All our knowledge on the subject is derived from the documents of the Spanish and Catholic writers. They tell their own story, in their own way.

The earliest elaborate discussion of the fundamental question of the right of a Christian nation to make conquest of a barbarous and idolatrous people, and to assume the mastery over them, was the result of the protest of that noble enthusiast and philanthropist, Las Casas, the great apostle to the Indies. His father had been one of Columbus's ship-mates in his first voyage. The first sentiment of pity, which afterwards engaged the heart of Las Casas towards the natives for his whole following life, is thus pleasingly traced to its source. Among the captives taken to Spain by Columbus was a boy whom he had given to the father of Las Casas. The father had assigned this youth to his son, then a student at Salamanca. When Isabella had insisted that these captives should be returned, the youth was taken with them, much to the grief of Las Casas. He went with Ovando to Hispaniola in 1502, in his twenty-eighth year, and at once became the friend and champion of the natives against the dire and ruthless barbarities and the shocking outrages, so inhuman and atrocious, inflicted upon them by the Spaniards, as they slew them by thousands, after practising upon them the foulest treacheries, starving them, working them to death in the