g the Indians by their inhuman cruelties to acts of
resistance, in order to enslave them as rebels against the royal
authority. He illustrated his accusations with numerous incidents of which
he had himself been a witness.

His denunciations of the judges described them as corrupt and venal, ready
to wink at the scandalous abuses and the violations of the Spanish laws,
which were daily perpetrated under their very eyes, consenting the while
to fill their own pockets with a share of the illicit profits.

Describing the horrors and ravages of the slave-trade, he declared that
the provinces of Guatemala and Nicaragua had been depopulated, while in
the provinces of Jalisco, Yucatan, and Panuco, similar outrages had been
perpetrated, adding that the Germans in Venezuela were even more adroit
than the Spaniards in the nefarious art of raiding Indian villages to
carry off the inhabitants into slavery. "Your Majesty will see that I do
not exaggerate when I affirm that more than four million men have been
reduced to slavery, all of which has been accomplished in defiance of your
Majesty's royal instructions."

Throughout this treatise, Las Casas supports his contentions on citations
from Scripture, and in the second article, dealing with the obligations of
the King towards his Indian subjects, he defines in very plain language
the sanctions on which the royal claims to obedience rest: "The law of God
imposes on the king the obligation to administer his kingdoms in such wise
that small and great, poor and rich, the weak and the powerful, shall all
be treated with equal justice";--such is his Statement of the King's duty
and he supports it with quotations from Deuteronomy, Leviticus, the
prophet Isaias, and St. Jerome, concluding with these words: "In fact,
history furnishes examples of God chastising the nations and kingdoms
which have refused justice to the poor and the orphan. Who shall venture
to say that such may not be the fate of Spain, if the King denies the poor
Indians their just dues and fails to give them the liberty, to which they
have an incontestable right?"

Nor does he limit the King's responsibility to his personal acts in cases
which may come directly to his knowledge; he is obliged also to see that
his subjects observe one another's rights and live according to the laws
of civil order and public morality. The object for which society and
rulers exist is to insure the common weal of all, and no sovereign ca