Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/88

68 Mines of the precious metals, gems and pearls — even more than food and water when they were on the edge of death — were the consuming cravings of the Spaniard. If a single token of such treasure was seen to sparkle or to gleam on the person of a savage, the secret of its source must be wrung from him; he must point the way to the mine; he must toil there to work it. Visions floated before the dreams of the invaders of spots where the soil was made of virgin gold and silver, of palaces built of those metals, of kitchen utensils and working tools fashioned from them. The poor natives, in their desperation, over and over again intermitted their simple husbandry on their own soil, in their own support, with the childish thought that they could starve the Spaniards and compel them to go home. There is an element of confusion in the history, for all modern readers, in the number of Spanish officials, with long, hard, high-sounding titles, among whom were distributed inconsistent functions, rival prerogatives of place and jurisdiction, with their jealousies, each having his partisans before the Council of the Indies and at the Spanish court. And these were not only haughty grandees and hidalgos, but adventurers of an ordinary type, from a land in which even the peasants had the spirit and port of gentlemen. Yet to relieve, if possible, this dismal justification of the right and duty of the conquest of the heathen, we must make emphatic the verbal statement, — and, our charity must add, the intent, — that conversion to the true faith and fold must be the accompaniment and crown of conquest. If the heathen should perish by the million in the savagery of the process which was designed for their conversion, this accident did not prejudice the Tightness and holiness of the intent. The conquerors meant to impart to the poor benighted creatures an unspeakable deliverance and blessing; but Satan had the start of them, and claimed his own. When, after an atrocious course of rapine,