God's image in their fellow-men and sacrificed hecatombs of human victims to gratify their greed for riches.

From the hour of his awakening, we follow him during sixty years of ceaseless activity such as few men have ever displayed. His vehemence tormented his adversaries beyond endurance, and they charged him with stirring up dissensions and strife in the colonies, ruining trade, discouraging emigration to the Indies, and, by his importunate and reckless propaganda, with inciting the Indians to rebellion. Granting that some abuses existed, they argued that his methods for redressing them were [pg xix] more pernicious than the evils themselves; prudent measures should be employed, not the radical and precipitate method of the fanatical friar, and time would gradually do the rest. Men who argued such as the Bishop of Burgos and Lope Conchillos, were large holders of encomienda properties, who objected to having their sources of income disturbed. Las Casas penetrated the flimsy disguise they sought to throw over their real purpose, to smother the truth the better to consolidate and extend their interests, and realising that his only hope of success lay in keeping the subject always to the front, he pursued his inexorable course of teaching, writing, journeying to America to impeach judges and excommunicate refractory colonists, and thence back again to Spain to publish his accusations broadcast and petition redress from the King and his Councils.

The most respectable of his contemporary opponents in the New World was Toribio de Benevente, under his popular Indian name of Motolinia. In 1555, Motolinia wrote a letter to in which he dealt severely with the accusations of Las Casas, whom he described as a restless, turbulent man, who wandered from one colony to another, provoking disturbances and scandals. He confined himself to a general denial of the alleged outrages, without attempting to refute them by presenting proofs of their falsity, while his indignation was prompted by his patriotism. He was shocked that a Spaniard should publish such accusations against his own countrymen; [pg xx] things which would be read by foreigners and even by Indians, and thus bring reproach on the Spanish national honour. He expressed astonishment that the Emperor permitted the publication and circulation of such books, taxing their author with wilful exaggeration and false statements, and pointing out that the accusations brought more dishonour on the monarch than on his subjects.

Motolinia was a devout man, whose apostolic life among the Indians won him his dearly loved name, equivalent to “the poor man” or poverello of St. Francis, but with all his virtues, he belonged to the type of churchman that dreads scandal above everything else. The methods of Las Casas scandalised him; it wounded his patriotism that Spaniards should be held up to the execration of Christendom, and he rightly apprehended that such damaging information, published broadcast, would serve as a formidable weapon in the hands of the adversaries of his church and country. It must also be remembered that he lived in Mexico, where Las Casas admits that the condition of the Indians was better than in the islands and other parts of the coast country.

The Bishop of Burgos and Lope Conchillos will be seen to be fair exponents of the bureaucratic type of opponents to the reforms Las Casas advocated. The Bishop in particular appears in an unsympathetic light throughout his long administration of American affairs. Of choleric temper, his manners were aggressive and authoritative, and he used his high position to advance his private interests. He [pg xxi] was a disciplinarian, a bureaucrat averse to novelties and hostile to enthusiasms. He anticipated Talleyrand's maxim “Sûrtout pas de zole,” and to be nagged at by a meddlesome friar was intolerable to him. Such men were probably no more consciously inhuman than many otherwise irreproachable people of all times, who complacently pocket dividends from deadly industries, without a thought to the obscure producers of their wealth or to the conditions of moral and physical degradation amidst which their brief lives are spent.

The most formidable of all the adversaries of Las Casas was Gines de Sepulveda. A man of acute intellect, vast learning, and superlative eloquence, this practiced debater stood for theocracy and despotism, defending the papal and royal claims to jurisdiction over the New World. In striving to establish a dual tyranny over the souls and bodies of its inhabitants, he concerned himself not at all with the human aspect of the question nor did he even pretend to controvert the facts with which his opponent met him. He was exclusively engaged in upholding the abstract right of the Pope and the Spanish sovereigns to exercise spiritual and temporal jurisdiction over heathen, as well as Catholic peoples. To impugn this principle was, according to Sepulveda, to strike at the very foundations of Christendom; that a few thousands of pagans, more or less, suffered and perished, was of small importance, compared with the maintenance of this elemental principal. First conquer and then convert, was [pg xxii] his maxim. His thesis constitutes the very negation of Christianity.

Juan Gines de Sepúlveda

From the engraving by J. Barcelon, after the drawing of J. Maca.

Las Casas repeatedly challenged his opponents to refute his allegations or to contradict his facts and, in a letter to Carranza de Miranda in 1556, he wrote:

“It is moreover deplorable that, after having denounced this destruction of peoples to our sovereigns and their councils a thousand times during forty years, nobody has yet dreamed of proving the contrary and, after having done so, of punishing me by the shame of a retraction. The royal archives are filled with records of trials, reports, denunciations, and a quantity of other proofs of the assassinations…There exists also positive evidence of the immense population of Hispaniola—greater than that of all Spain—and of the islands of Cuba, Jamaica, and more than forty other islands, where neither animals nor vegetation survive. These countries are larger than the space that separates us from Persia, and the terra-firma is twice as considerable…I defy any living man, if he be not a fool, to dare deny what I allege, and to prove the contrary.”

His enemies were devoid of scruples, and unsparingly used every means to nullify his influence and destroy his credit. He was ridiculed as a madman—a monomaniac on the subject of Indians and their rights; his plainly stated facts were branded as exaggerations, though nobody accepted his challenge to contradict them. Such tactics alternated with others, for he was also described as a heretic, as disloyal and unpatriotic, seeking to impeach the validity of Spanish sovereignty in [pg xxiii] the Indies and to bring ruin on the national interests.

The missionary period of the life of Las Casas in America ended with his return to Spain in 1549 and the resignation of his episcopal see that followed in 1552. From that time may be dated the third and last period of his life, which was marked by his literary activity, for, though he never again visited