The most important article of the New Laws concerning the encomienda system provided as follows:
“Furthermore we ordain and command that from now and henceforth no Viceroy, Governor, Audiencia, discoverer, or any other persons whatsoever shall allot Indians in encomienda, neither by new provision or resignation, donation, sale, nor in any other form or manner; neither by vacancies, nor inheritance, but, that on the death of any person holding the said Indians, they shall revert to our royal Crown. Let the Audiencias [pg 208] take means to be immediately and particularly informed concerning the deceased person, his rank, merits, services, and his treatment of his Indians and whether there is a widow or children; they shall send us a report on the condition of the Indians and of the property that we may order what may be best for our service and may make such provision as may seem good to us for the widow and children of the deceased. Should the Audiencia meanwhile perceive a need to provide for such widow and children, they may do this out of the tribute paid by the said Indians, giving them a moderate amount for these Indians are under our Crown, as stated.”
This article provided for the gradual and total extinction of slavery, with due regard to the interests of the colonists, and though it did not meet the wishes of Las Casas for the immediate and absolute correction of the prevailing abuses, its strict application promised to produce more slowly, the results which he sought.
On the 20th of November, 1542, Charles V. signed the Nuevas Leyes of Valladolid, in the city of Barcelona, and their publication immediately followed.
Las Casas was in Valencia at this time and it was there that he finished the best known of all his writings, which was first printed in 1552 under the title Brevissima Relacion de la Destruycion de la Indias, and bore a dedication to Philip II. [52] This little book, as the reader may see from the translation of it given at the close of this volume, is a veritable catalogue of horrors. Man's invention [pg 209] has its limits, and the ways of torturing the human body are numbered, hence, as the descriptions of the various scenes of brutality repeat themselves over and over in the same language, they end by becoming wearisome. The book was speedily translated into various European languages and its dissemination aroused a tempest of indignation against the Spanish colonial system in America. Its contents were made to serve in the religious and political controversies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and Las Casas was cited as a witness both against his Church and his country.
There is no doubt that every incident that Las Casas relates as coming within his own knowledge and observation is true, though Prescott describes “the good Bishop's arithmetic as coming from the heart than from the head” and historians generally have been inclined to doubt his figures. His description of the mild and friendly character of the natives of the islands was doubtless exact, but when he extends it to include the fierce and warlike tribes of the mainland, his generalisations are seen to be misleading. None of the peoples of Anáhuac could be truthfully described as “gentle lambs” or as “humble, submissive, and docile, knowing no evil and neither possessing nor understanding the use of weapons.” Slavery was everywhere established, with its attendant abuses and evils, and it was slavery that Las Casas combated. It must be borne in mind that Las Casas was a man in whom humanitarianism overshadowed every other sentiment, [pg 210] that he was of an ardent, impressionable and imaginative temperament, with sensibilities of the most delicate sort; moreover, he was an apostle, the defender of an oppressed people, whom he had taken under his protection and whose cause it was the mission of his life to sustain and defend. The violation of divine and human justice had been erected into a system by the conquerors and discoverers and nothing, in his eyes, could palliate the evils which that system fostered, and by which the colonists prospered, while the native races were dwindling to extinction. Beyond these primary facts, he refused to see; of them, he had seen more than enough to inflame his indignation and start him upon the crusade for which his iron constitution, his superior intellectual powers, and his resistless eloquence were alone adequate. He was frequently betrayed into invective, and his denunciations are as fierce as language could make them, while the energetic terms in which he depicts, in all their bald horror, the revolting inhumanity of his countrymen provoke a shudder. The Brevissima Relacion is not literature for sensitive readers.
CHAPTER XV. - THE BISHOPRICS OFFERED TO LAS CASAS. HIS CONSECRATION. HIS DEPARTURE
Copies of the New Laws, accompanied by a royal letters of instruction, were sent, not only to the viceroys, governors, and Audiencias in America, but also to the priors of the different convents, so that the knowledge of their provisions might be as widely diffused as possible and the vigilance of the friars excited to see that they were obeyed both in the letter and the spirit. Las Casas went from Valencia to Barcelona to thank the Emperor, and while there, the royal secretary, Francisco de los Cobos, waited on him one Sunday afternoon, bearing his appointment by the Emperor to the newly erected bishopric of Cuzco, which, for extent of territory, number of inhabitants, and vast resources, was the richest in the New World. Such a recognition from the sovereign could not be otherwise than welcome to Las Casas, who was perhaps the most abused man of his time both in America and Spain, but his determination not to accept the dignity was positive, though veiled at the outset under the plea that, being a Dominican and bound by the rule of obedience, he could not receive the royal nomination without the previous consent of his superiors.