hus
far served to save the weaker races of mankind from absorption or
extermination. The fiercer and stronger tribes of American Indians
receded before the Anglo-Saxon invasion of their territories, leaving a
trail of blood behind them, while the weaker nations of the islands and
Southern Americas went down before the Spaniards, with hardly more than a
plaintive cry for mercy.

The price of civilisation is a high one, and as the peoples of Europe paid
it, so were the aboriginal populations of America not exempted from the
blood-tax. The obscure workings of the mysterious laws of race-survival
were forced on and hastened by the cruelties against which Las Casas
protested in vain, but the triumphal march of human progress has followed
on. Cannibalism, idolatry, slavery, and other barbarisms have disappeared
from the American continents; the Christian religion has replaced
degrading superstitions, agriculture and commerce flourish, while
literature and the arts adorn life in the several republics, whose meanest
citizen enjoys a security of life and property unknown to the proudest of
their ancestors under the rule of Montezuma or the Incas. Belief in the
principles of equity and charity forbids us to doubt that these and even
nobler results might have been achieved by the methods advocated by Las
Casas, but history records no racial expansion along other roads than that
opened by the sword.

CHAPTER XIII. - PROFESSION OF LAS CASAS. THE CACIQUE ENRIQUE. JOURNEYS OF
LAS CASAS. A PEACEFUL VICTORY

Although held in general detestation in Hispaniola, as a seditious
mischief-maker and an enemy of the Spaniards' interests, there were not
wanting some sympathisers who, when Las Casas arrived, dejected and
bankrupt, at Santo Domingo, received him kindly, and even offered to lend
him five thousand ducats with which to begin again.

The clear thinking and high resolution which had carried him through so
many trials seemed at this time to fail him; nor indeed is there just
cause for wonder, for there is a limit to human powers of endurance, and
if ever a man was overtaken by a dark hour, Las Casas was he. In after
years, he arraigned his own conduct at this period with undue severity,
reflecting that as the Emperor was back in Spain with the Flemings, and
his old friend Cardinal Adrian had become Pope, he might have accomplished
his life's purpose of ending the sufferings of the Indians, had he only
adopted the reso