Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/85

Rh apology for their conquest.” Popocatapetl yielded its sulphur to Cortes in replenishing his ammunition.

But it does not appear that any deepening shade of the state of heathenism heightened in the breast of a child of the Church the right or duty of conquest. There could be no worse state than that of a heathen; no greater, no less degree in his condemnation. Every infliction, horror, or agony visited upon his body was a stretch and an ingenuity of mercy to him, because intended (even if not effectual) for the saving of his soul. If he could only be baptized before he died, he owed an unspeakable debt to any one who, by whatever cruelty, terminated his life. But if after all this cruelty he died unbaptized, that was his misfortune. The history of Spanish discovery, exploration, and colonization, so far as it concerns the relations of the invaders with the natives, is at every stage of it marked by ruthless and atrocious cruelties, by outrages and enormities of iniquity, over the perusal of which the heart sickens. Those who crave a knowledge of them in the detail must seek it in the too faithful — we can hardly, in this connection, use the pure terms “truthful” and “candid” — historical narratives. There is no good use to come of the rehearsal of them. One whose painful task has required of him to trace in the records that story of torturous horror, can hardly fail to wish that those records had never been written, or that they had perished, had lost their awful skill of forever perpetuating the story of man's inhumanity to man, and had become as mute as the heart-pangs and the once quivering nerves of the victims that have been resolved into peaceful dust. Indeed, so faithfully was the curious skill of the graver engaged to illustrate the brutal enormities of these conquests, that, without reading a line of the text of many of these volumes, one may learn more than he craves of their contents simply from their illustrations.

After reading those sweet words and phrases in which