they not, instead thereof, been taught to set their affections on
things above? And finally, to use the words of a reverend Spanish father,
in a letter to his superior in Spain: "Can any one have the presumption to
say that these savage pagans have yielded anything more than an
inconsiderable recompense to their benefactors, in surrendering to them a
little pitiful tract of this dirty sublunary planet, in exchange for a
glorious inheritance in the kingdom of heaven."

Here then are three complete and undeniable sources of right established,
any one of which was more than ample to establish a property in the
newly-discovered regions of America. Now, so it has happened in certain
parts of this delightful quarter of the globe that the right of discovery
has been so strenuously asserted--the influence of cultivation so
industriously extended, and the progress of salvation and civilization so
zealously persecuted; that, what with their attendant wars, persecutions,
oppressions, diseases, and other partial evils that often hang on the
skirts of great benefits--the savage aborigines have, somehow or other,
been utterly annihilated--and this all at once brings me to a fourth
right, which is worth all the others put together. For the original
claimants to the soil being all dead and buried, and no one remaining to
inherit or dispute the soil, the Spaniards, as the next immediate
occupants, entered upon the possession as clearly as the hangman succeeds
to the clothes of the malefactor--and as they have Blackstone[21] and all
the learned expounders of the law on their side, they may set all actions
of ejectment at defiance--and this last right may be entitled the right by
extermination, or in other words, the right by gunpowder.

But lest any scruples of conscience should remain on this head, and to
settle the question of right for ever, his holiness Pope Alexander VI.
issued a mighty Bull, by which he generously granted the newly-discovered
quarter of the globe to the Spaniards and Portuguese; who, thus having law
and gospel on their side, and being inflamed with great spiritual zeal,
showed the pagan savages neither favor nor affection, but persecuted the
work of discovery, colonization, civilization, and extermination with ten
times more fury than ever.

Thus were the European worthies who first discovered America clearly
entitled to the soil, and not only entitled to the soil, but likewise to
the eternal thanks of these infi