esults which were to follow their
madness and folly."

"Well, Captain," asked Robert, "if the free North would submit to be
called on to help them catch their slaves, what could be expected of us,
who all our lives had known no other condition than that of slavery? How
much braver would you have been, if your first recollections had been
those of seeing your mother maltreated, your father cruelly beaten, or
your fellow-servants brutally murdered? I wonder why they never enslaved
the Indians!"

"You are mistaken, Robert, if you think the Indians were never enslaved.
I have read that the Spaniards who visited the coasts of America
kidnapped thousands of Indians, whom they sent to Europe and the West
Indies as slaves. Columbus himself, we are informed, captured five
hundred natives, and sent them to Spain. The Indian had the lesser power
of endurance, and Las Cassas suggested the enslavement of the negro,
because he seemed to possess greater breadth of physical organization
and stronger power of endurance. Slavery was an old world's crime which,
I have heard, the Indians never practiced among themselves. Perhaps it
would have been harder to reduce them to slavery and hold them in
bondage when they had a vast continent before them, where they could
hide in the vastnesses of its mountains or the seclusion of its forests,
than it was for white men to visit the coasts of Africa and, with their
superior knowledge, obtain cargoes of slaves, bring them across the
ocean, hem them in on the plantations, and surround them with a pall of
dense ignorance."

"I remember," said Robert, "in reading a history I once came across at
our house, that when the Africans first came to this country they did
not all speak one language. Some had only met as mutual enemies. They
were not all one color, their complexions ranging from tawny yellow to
deep black."

"Yes," said Captain Sybil, "and in dealing with the negro we wanted his
labor; in dealing with the Indian we wanted his lands. For one we had
weapons of war; for the other we had real and invisible chains, the
coercion of force, and the terror of the unseen world."

"That's exactly so, Captain! When I was a boy I used to hear the old
folks tell what would happen to bad people in another world; about the
devil pouring hot lead down people's throats and stirring them up with a
pitch-fork; and I used to get so scared that I would be afraid to go to
bed at night. I don't suppose the Indian