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; nor to eat
human flesh, than we do to eat mutton.

When I had considered this a little, it followed necessarily, that I was
certainly in the wrong in it; 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 albeit 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 me, 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 had really 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 idolaters and barbarians, and had several
bloody and barbarous rites in these 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, even by 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 such, as 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 product of a race of men, who were without principles of
tenderness, or the common bowels of pity to the miserable, which is
reckoned to be a mark of a generous temper in the mind.

These considerations really put me to a pause, and to a kind of a full
stop; and I began by little and little to be off of my design, and to
conclude I had taken a wrong measure in my resolutions to attack the
savages; that it was not my business