arrel of
that blood which they shed promiscuously upon one another. I debated
this very often with myself thus: "How do I know what God Himself judges
in this particular case? It is certain these people do not commit this
as a crime; it is not against their own consciences reproving, or their
light reproaching them; they do not know it to be an offence, and then
commit it in defiance of divine justice, as we do in almost all the sins
we commit. They think it no more a crime to kill a captive taken in war
than we do to kill an ox; or to eat human flesh than we do to eat
mutton."

When I considered this a little, it followed necessarily that I was
certainly in the wrong; that these people were not murderers, in the
sense that I had before condemned them in my thoughts, any more than
those Christians were murderers who often put to death the prisoners
taken in battle; or more frequently, upon many occasions, put whole
troops of men to the sword, without giving quarter, though they threw
down their arms and submitted. In the next place, it occurred to me that
although the usage they gave one another was thus brutish and inhuman,
yet it was really nothing to me: these people had done me no injury: that
if they attempted, or I saw it necessary, for my immediate preservation,
to fall upon them, something might be said for it: but that I was yet out
of their power, and they really had no knowledge of me, and consequently
no design upon me; and therefore it could not be just for me to fall upon
them; that this would justify the conduct of the Spaniards in all their
barbarities practised in America, where they destroyed millions of these
people; who, however they were idolators and barbarians, and had several
bloody and barbarous rites in their customs, such as sacrificing human
bodies to their idols, were yet, as to the Spaniards, very innocent
people; and that the rooting them out of the country is spoken of with
the utmost abhorrence and detestation by even the Spaniards themselves at
this time, and by all other Christian nations of Europe, as a mere
butchery, a bloody and unnatural piece of cruelty, unjustifiable either
to God or man; and for which the very name of a Spaniard is reckoned to
be frightful and terrible, to all people of humanity or of Christian
compassion; as if the kingdom of Spain were particularly eminent for the
produce of a race of men who were without principles of tenderness, or
the common bowels of p