led slavery; the
natives were supposed to be paid a minute sum, and their employers were
also expected to teach them the Christian religion. That was the plan.
The way in which it worked was that, a body of native men being allotted
to a Spanish settler for a period, say, of six or eight months--for the
enactment was precise in putting a period to the term of slavery--the
natives would be marched off, probably many days' journey from their
homes and families, and set to work under a Spanish foreman. The work,
as we have already seen, was infinitely harder than that to which they
were accustomed; and most serious of all, it was done under conditions
that took all the heart out of the labour. A man will toil in his own
garden or in tilling his own land with interest and happiness, not
counting the hours which he spends there; knowing in fact that his work
is worth doing, because he is doing it for a good reason. But put the
same man to work in a gang merely for the aggrandisement of some other
over-man; and the heart and cheerfulness will soon die out of him.

It was so with these children of the sun. They were put to work ten
times harder than any they had ever done before, and they were put to it
under the lash. The light diet of their habit had been sufficient to
support them in their former existence of happy idleness and dalliance,
and they had not wanted anything more than their cassava bread and a
little fish and fruit; now, however, they were put to work at a pressure
which made a very different kind of feeding necessary to them, and this
they did not get. Now and then a handful of pork would be divided among
a dozen of them, but they were literally starved, and were accustomed to
scramble like dogs for the bones that were thrown from the tables of the
Spaniards, which bones they ground up and mixed with their, bread so that
no portion of them might be lost. They died in numbers under these hard
conditions, and, compared with their lives, their deaths must often have
been happy. When the time came for them to go home they were generally
utterly worn out and crippled, and had to face a long journey of many
days with no food to support them but what they could get on the journey;
and the roads were strewn with the dead bodies of those who fell by the
way.

And far worse things happened to them than labour and exhaustion. It
became the custom among the Spaniards to regard the lives of the natives
as of far