ement he was, as we know, entitled
to a share of all rents and dues, as well as of the gold collected; but
it had been no one's business to collect these for him, and every one's
business to neglect them. No one had cared; no one had kept any accounts
of what was due to the Admiral; he could not find out what had been paid
and what had not been paid. He accused Ovando of having impeded his
agent Carvajal in his duty of collecting the Admiral's revenues, and of
disobeying the express orders of Queen Isabella in that matter; and so
on-a state of affairs the most wearisome, sordid, and unprofitable in
which any man could be involved.

And if Columbus turned his eyes from the office in San Domingo inland to
that Paradise which he had entered twelve years before, what change and
ruin, dreary, horrible and complete, did he not discover! The birds
still sang, and the nights were still like May in Cordova; but upon that
happy harmony the sound of piteous cries and shrieks had long since
broken, and along and black December night of misery had spread its pall
over the island. Wherever he went, Columbus found the same evidence of
ruin and desolation. Where once innumerable handsome natives had
thronged the forests and the villages, there were now silence and smoking
ruin, and the few natives that he met were emaciated, terrified, dying.
Did he reflect, I wonder, that some part of the responsibility of all
this horror rested on him? That many a system of island government, the
machinery of which was now fed by a steady stream of human lives, had
been set going by him in ignorance, or greed of quick commercial returns?
It is probable that he did not; for he now permanently regarded himself
as a much-injured man, and was far too much occupied with his own wrongs
to realise that they were as nothing compared with the monstrous stream
of wrong and suffering that he had unwittingly sent flowing into the
world.

In the island under Ovando's rule Columbus saw the logical results of his
own original principles of government, which had recognised the right of
the Christians to possess the persons and labours of the heathen natives.
Las Casas, who was living in Espanola as a young priest at this time, and
was destined by long residence there and in the West Indies to qualify
himself as their first historian, saw what Columbus saw, and saw also the
even worse things that happened in after years in Cuba and Jamaica; and
it is to him th