24. The Indians will naturally oppose the invasion of their country by a title of conquest, and so will resist the work of conversion.
25. The kings of Spain have from the first given and reiterated their orders against war and the ill-treatment of the Indians. If any officers have shown commissions and warrants for such practices, they have been forged or deceptive.
26. So all wars and conquests which have been made have been unjust and tyrannical, and in effect null; as is proved by proceedings on record in the Council against such tyrants and other culprits, who are amenable to judgment.
27. The kings of Spain are bound to reinforce and establish those Indian laws and customs which are good—and such are most of them—and to abolish the bad; thus upholding good manners and civil policy. The Gospel is the method for effecting this.
28. The Devil could not have done more mischief than the Spaniards have done in distributing and spoiling the countries, in their rapacity and tyranny; subjecting the natives to cruel tasks, treating them like beasts, and persecuting those especially who apply to the monks for instruction.
29. The distribution of the Indians among the Spaniards as slaves is wholly contrary to all the royal orders given by Isabella successively to Columbus, Bobadilla, and De Lares. Columbus gave three hundred Indians to Spaniards who had done the most service to the Crown, and took but one for his own use. The Queen ordered all except that one to be sent back. What would she have said to the present iniquities? The King is reminded that his frequent journeys and absences have prevented his fully informing himself of these facts.
30. From all these considerations it follows that all conquests, acquisitions, usurpations, and appropriations by officers and private persons have no legality, as contrary to the orders of the Spanish monarchs.
Here certainly is an admirable and cogent statement of the principles of equity and righteousness, as based upon natural laws and certified and fortified by the great verities and sanctions supposed to be held in reverence by professed Christians. Las Casas, in taking for his starting-point the Pope’s supreme and inclusive right over half the globe, just brought to the knowledge of civilized men, seems to make a monstrous assumption, only greater than that of the Spanish kings’ holding under and deriving dominion from him. But we may well pardon this assumption to so loyal a disciple of the Church, when we consider how nobly he held this Papal right as conditioned and limited, involving lofty duties, and balanced by an obligation to confer inestimable blessings. He had ever before him the contrast between fair scenes of luxurious Nature, ministering to the easy happiness of a gentle race of delicate and short-lived beings akin to himself, and the ruthless passions, lusts, and savagery of his own countrymen and fellow-Christians. We can well account for the opposition and thwarting of his efforts amid these scenes, but may need a further explanation of the resistance and ill-success which he encountered when pleading his cause before monarchs and great councillors at home, whose sympathies seem to have been generally on his side. He often stood wholly alone in scenes where these ravaging cruelties had full sweep,—alone in the humane sensitiveness with which he regarded them; alone in freedom from the mastering passions of greed and rapacity which excited them; and alone in realizing the appalling contrast between the spirit of blood and rapine which prompted them, and the spirit of that Gospel, the assumed championship of which at these ends of the earth was the blasphemous pretence of these murderers. Those ruthless tyrants, who here treated hundreds and thousands of the natives subject to them worse than even brutes from which useful service is expected, would not, of course, have the front to offer on the spot the pretence set up for them by their abetters at the Spanish Court,—that they were thus drawing the natives to them for their conversion; they laughed at the Clerigo when they did not openly thwart him.
Las Casas had many powerful and embittered opponents, and by the use of various means and artifices they were able to put impediments in his way, to qualify and avert what would seem to be the natural effects of his ardent appeals and shocking disclosures, and to keep him through his protracted life in what looked like a hopeless struggle against giant iniquities. Nor is it necessary that we go deeper than the obvious surface of the story to find the reasons for the opposition and discomfiture which he encountered. It may be that all those who opposed him or who would not co-operate with him were not personally interested in the iniquities which he exposed and sought to redress. Something may need to be said by and by concerning alleged faults of temper, over-ardor of zeal and overstatement, and wild exaggeration attributed to this bold apostle of righteousness. But that the substance of all his charges, and the specifications of inhumanity, cruelty, and atrocity which he set forth in detail, and with hardly enough diversity to vary his narrative, is faithful to the soberest truth, cannot be questioned. He spoke and wrote of what he had seen and known. He had looked upon sights of shocking and enormous iniquity and barbarity, over every scene which he had visited in his unresting travel. His sleep by night had been broken by the piteous shrieks of the wretched victims of slow tortures.
Much help may be derived by a reader towards a fuller appreciation of the character and life-work of Las Casas from the biography of him and the translation and editing of his principal writings by his ardent admirer, Llorente.[1020] This writer refers to a previous abridged translation of the works of Las Casas, published in Paris in 1642. His own edition in French, in 1822, is more full, though somewhat condensed and reconstructed. He remarks justly upon the prolixity of Las Casas, his long periods, his repetitions, his pedantic quotations from Scripture and the Latin authors, as the results of his peripatetic training. His translator and editor credits to the magnanimity and nobleness of nature of Las Casas the omission of the names of great offenders in connection with the terrible wrongs done by them. This reserve of Las Casas has been already referred to. But Llorente, in seventeen critical notes, answering to the same number of divisions in the Relation of Las Casas, supplies the names of the leading criminals; and he also gives in a necrology the shocking or tragic elements and the dates of the death of these “men of blood.” He adds to the “Remedies” which Las Casas had suggested to Charles V. the whole additional series of measures proposed up to 1572. Llorente says that, admitting that the starting-point in the Thirty Propositions of Las Casas,—namely, the assumption of the Papal prerogative as to new-discovered territory,—was in his day “incontestable,” it is now recognized as a falsity. He furnishes an essay of his own upon the right and wrong of the claim; and he adds to that of Las Casas a treatise on the limits of the sovereign power of the King. Paw first, and then Raynal and Robertson, had brought the charge against Las Casas of having first introduced African slavery into the New World. As we have seen, the charge was false. Gregoire, bishop of Blois, read an Apologie before the Institute of France in 1801, in vindication of the Clerigo. This Apologie is given at length by Llorente. He adds, from manuscripts in the Royal Library of Paris, two inedited treatises of Las Casas, written in 1555-1564,—one against a project for perpetuating the commanderies in the New World; the other on the necessity of restoring the crown of Peru to the Inca Titus.[1021]