ling emigration,--men bred in crime coalescing with men
whose awakened passions made them candidates for prison,--the whole
community, with the exception of the preacher and his scattered
sympathizers, animated by one desire, to get the gold, to exhaust the
soil, to glut voluptuous immunity, to fill the veins with a fiery
climate, and to hurry back with wealth enough to feed it more safely in
the privacies of Madrid and Seville. What were preaching and benevolent
intention, where shaven superstition was inculcating the cross by its
weight alone, and bearded ferocity desolated with the sword what the
cross could spare? The discussion which Montesino raised went home to
Spain; but when a board of commissioners, charged to investigate the
subject, advised that all Indians granted to Spanish courtiers, and to
all other persons who did not reside upon the island, should be set
at liberty, the colonists saw the entering wedge of emancipation. The
discontent was so great, and the alternative of slavery or ruin was
so passionately offered to the Government at home, that the system of
_repartimientos_ remained untouched; for the Government felt that it
must choose between the abandonment of the island and the destruction of
those who alone, if judiciously protected, could make it profitable to
retain it.

Protection and amelioration, then, became the cry. In consequence of the
great increase of cattle in the island, it was considered no more than
just that the Indians should no longer be used as beasts of burden. They
were also to have one day in the seven, besides the Church festivals,
for their own use; and intendants were appointed who were to have a
general supervision of their affairs, and to protect them from barbarous
punishments. These regulations were a weir of reeds thrown across a
turbid and tumultuous Amazon.

Las Casas was an eye-witness of the cruelties which he exposed in his
memoirs to the Government, those uncompromising indictments of his own
nation and of the spirit of the age. He had seen the natives slaughtered
like sheep in a pen, and the butchers laid bets with each other upon
their dexterity in cleaving them asunder at a stroke. Children, torn
from the bosoms of their mothers, were brained against the stones, or
thrown into the water with mocking cries,--"That will refresh you!" A
favorite mode of immolation, which had the merit of exciting theological
associations, was to bind thirteen of the natives to