Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/89

Rh and ferocity by the invaders, the Inca Atahualpa was in the power of the Spaniards, his sentence was to be brought to death by fire. This was mercifully commuted to death by the bowstring, on the victim's consenting to be baptized.

To be baptized! In the — devout shall we call it? — conviction of priest and believer, baptism signified conversion. True, men cannot impart what they have not themselves; and as baptism was about the whole of Christianity of which the ruthless invaders had the knowledge or the advantage, the rite signified the imparting the full benefit of the gospel of Christ to the heathen, as it did to those born in a Christian land.

In closing this rehearsal of the tragic and hideous story of the first opening of intercourse by Europeans, as represented by the Spaniards, with the natives of this continent, it would be a relief if a single gleam of light or mercy could be thrown across the distressing narrative. Our authorities are exclusively Spanish writers, many of them ecclesiastics. There is a series of similar relations awaiting our review, all of them stained with wrong and cruelty; and those of them which are associated with Puritan savagery, and even with the perfidy and meanness of our own republican Government, have many points of likeness to that which we have been reading. Nor do such harrowing episodes in history stand alone by themselves, or throw their shadows only over ages that are past. The brutal oppression of the weak by the strong finds its most signal illustrations in the annals of so-called Christian nations. Great Britain up to our own time, substituting the claims of civilization and of free intercourse for trade for those which the Spaniards advanced for the “holy faith,” has committed like atrocities in every quarter of the globe. Every feeble people and race, with degrees of civilization or barbarism, has had to yield to her compulsion for intercourse beyond their own wish and need; and she has