justice practised on the negroes, simultaneously with his keen
perception of that which was being perpetrated on the Indians, his failure
cannot be justly attributed either to indifference to the lot of one race
of people or to wilful inconsistency in seeking to benefit another at its
expense. That his action was not understood in any such sense at the
time, is conclusively proven by the fact that inconsistency was never
alleged against him, nor employed as a polemical weapon in the heated
controversies in which he was engaged during all his life with the keenest
and most determined opponents to his views. Far afield indeed did his
enemies wander, seeking for weapons both of attack and defence, and
nothing that could be twisted into an offence against the public
conscience or national interests escaped the keen eyes of the searchers.
He was himself the first to perceive the error and contradiction into
which he had inadvertently fallen, and forty years before Herrera's work
was published, he had expressed his contrition for his failure to
appreciate the conditions of African slavery, in the following passage,
which occurs in the fourth volume (page 380) of his _Historia General_:

"The cleric Las Casas first gave this opinion that license should be
granted to bring negro slaves to these countries [the Indies] without
realising with what injustice the Portuguese captured and enslaved them,
and afterwards, not for everything in the world would he have offered it,
for he always held that they were made slaves by injustice and tyranny,
the same reasoning applying to them as to the Indians."

Fuller and more mature consideration of the entire question of slavery in
all its aspects, of the right of one man or of nations to hold property in
the flesh and blood of their fellow-men, conducted Las Casas directly to
the necessary and generous conviction that the whole system must be
everywhere condemned; for again in Chapter 128 he says of this advice
which the cleric gave,

"that he very shortly after repented, judging himself guilty of
inadvertence; and as he saw--which will be later perceived--that the
captivity of the negroes was quite as unjust as that of the Indians, the
remedy he had counselled, that negroes should be brought so that the
Indians might be freed, was no better, even though he believed they had
been rightfully procured; although he was not positive that his ignorance
in this matter and his good intention wo