Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings. Francis Augustus MacNutt
through a bureaucracy, of which were the members were rarely efficient and usually corrupt, hence it followed that Spaniards were bereft of any incentive to colonise, save one—their individual aggrandisement. Their inherited habit of obedience reconciled them to the absence of any share in the direction and control of the colony in which their lot was thrown, but such a system of administration deprived them of the possibility of acquiring experience in the management [pg x] of public affairs. Its effects were pernicious and far-reaching, for when the colonies outgrew the bonds that linked them to Spain, their people, ignorant of the meaning of true liberty, and untrained in self-government, followed their instinct of blind submission to direction from above, and fell an easy prey to demagogues. Deprived of participation in framing the laws, the colonists employed their ingenuity in devising means to evade or nullify those which they deemed obnoxious or contrary to their interests, and constant practice soon perfected their perverted activities in this direction, until obstruction and procrastination were erected into a system, against which even royal decrees were powerless.
The results that followed were logical and inevitable. Laws devoid of sufficient force to ensure their effective execution fail to afford the relief or protection their enactment designs to provide, and ineffectual laws are worse than no laws at all, for their defeat weakens the government that enacts them and tends to bring all law into contempt. Conditions of distance, the corruption of the colonial officials, the conflict between local authorities, and the astutely organised opposition of the colonists repeatedly thwarted the honest efforts of the home government to safeguard the liberty of the Indians, which the Spanish sovereigns had defined to be natural and inalienable, definitions that had received the solemn sanction of the Roman pontiffs.
Spanish and English methods of dealing with the aboriginal tribes of America offer as sharp a contrast [pg xi] as do their respective systems of colonial government. Whether the devil himself possesses ingenuity in inflicting suffering, superior to that displayed by the Spanish conquerors and their immediate followers, has never been demonstrated. The gentle, unresisting natives of the West Indian Islands, whose delicate constitutions incapacitated them to bear labours their masters exacted of them, were their first victims. The descriptions penned as of the cruelties practised on these harmless creatures dispense me from the ungrateful task of attempting to depict them. But, while the individual Indian suffered inhuman tortures at the hands of the Spaniards, the race survived and, by amalgamation with the invaders, it continues to propagate, and to rise in the scale of humanity.
The English colonists found different conditions waiting them when they landed on the northern coasts of America, where the Indian tribes were neither gentle nor submissive. Two absolutely alien and hostile races faced one another, of which the higher professed small concern for the amelioration of the lower, while amalgamation was excluded by the mutual pride of race and the instinctive enmity that divided them. There was no enslaving of Indians, and the torturing was done entirely by the savages, but, while the English method spared the individual Indian the suffering his defenceless brother in the south had to endure, the aboriginal races have everywhere receded before the relentless advance of civilisation. The battle between the civilised and savage peoples has been uncompromising; the [pg xii] stronger of the Indian nations have gone down, fighting, while the remnants of such tribes as survive remain herded on the ever-encroaching frontiers of a civilisation in which a tolerable place has been but tardily provided for them. We cannot escape the conclusion that our treatment of the races we have displaced and exterminated has been as systematically and remorselessly destructive as was the spasmodic and ofttimes sportive cruelty operated by the Spaniards. The Spanish national conscience recognised the obligation of civilising and Christianising the Indians, a task which Spaniards finally accomplished. The Spanish sovereigns were honestly desirous of protecting their new subjects, and the injustice inflicted on the latter was done in defiance of the laws they enacted, as well as of public opinion in Spain, which condemned it as severely as could the most advanced humanitarian sentiment of our own times.
Las Casas voiced this condemnation and organised a masterly campaign of education on the subject of the proper method of dealing with the Indians. He suffered and endured for their sakes, while the men whose selfish and inhuman undertakings he thwarted poured the vilest abuse and calumny upon him. Nature had mercifully endowed him with no sensitiveness save for the sufferings of the oppressed, and he was as much a born fighter as the fiercest conqueror who ever landed in Spanish America. He waged a moral battle, animated by only the noblest motives, and in his damning arraignment of his countrymen, he eschewed personalities and, with [pg xiii] a charity as rare as it was becoming to his sacerdotal character, he occupied himself exclusively with the principles at stake, leaving the punishment of the criminals to the final justice of God.
The records of the earliest peoples of whom history preserves knowledge—Chaldeans, Egyptians, Phenicians, and Arabians—show that slavery has existed the remotest antiquity. Slavery was the common fate of prisoners of war in the time of Homer; Alexander sold the inhabitants of Thebes, and the Spartans reduced the entire population of Helos to servitude, so that Helot came to be synonymous with slave, while one of the laws inscribed on the Twelve Tables of Rome gave a creditor the right to sell an insolvent debtor into slavery to satisfy his claim. Wealthy Romans frequently possessed slaves, over whose lives and fortunes the owners were absolute masters.
Christianity first taught the unity and equality of mankind; salvation was for bond and free, for Jew and Gentile; the immortality of each human soul was affirmed; each man's body was defined of the Holy Ghost and a new dignity was conferred by these novel doctrines on universal mankind, which the lowly shared equally with the mighty. The Christian conception of liberty and equality however, referred more to the moral than to the material order. “The truth shall make you free.” It was not subversive of existing mundane conditions, but taught the duty of rendering Caesar his due, and of the servant being subject to his lord, the woman to her husband, [pg xiv] and children to their parents. The early Christians too sincerely despised the prizes of this world—including the greatest of all, liberty—to struggle for possession of any of them; unresponsive to the lure of earthly honours and treasures, they fixed their desires on things eternal. Slavery continued to coexist with Christianity: children were sold publicly in the markets of Bristol during the reign of King Alfred, and the villeins were bound to the glebe, changing masters with the transfer of the property from one proprietor to another. The laws of Richard III. and of Edward VI. dealt severely, not only with slaves, but with all deserters, runaway apprentices, and other recalcitrant dependents, who were reduced to partial or perpetual slavery for the most trivial offences. The condition of these various categories of bondmen, however, was more one of serfage and vassalage, the ancient system of slavery that had culminated in the Roman Empire having been modified by the mild doctrines of Christianity and the gradual spread of the new civilisation.
From the discoveries along the west coast of Africa, made by the Portuguese in the first half of the fifteenth century, may be dated the revival of the trade in slaves for purely commercial purposes. Portugal and southern Spain were thenceforward regularly supplied with cargoes of negroes, numbering between seven and eight hundred yearly. The promoter of these expeditions was Prince Henry of Portugal, third son of John I. and Philippa, daughter of John Gaunt, though in [pg xv] justice to that amiable and learned prince, it must be borne in mind that the capture and sale of negroes was merely incidental to explorations the unary purpose of which was purely scientific. Prince Henry held that the negroes thus captured into his dominions were amply compensated for the loss of such uncertain liberty as they enjoyed, by receiving the light of Christian teaching. It seems evident that most of them merely changed masters and probably gained by the exchange, for they were born subjects of barbarous rulers, in lands where the traffic in slaves was active. Many were obtained from the Arabs and Moors, who already held them in bondage and, without minimising the sufferings inseparable from all slave-trade, we may not unreasonably assume that those who reached Portugal and Spain were the least unfortunate of all their kind.
Las Casas, being a native of Andalusia, was familiar with this slave-trade, for Seville was well provided with domestic slaves, whose lot was not a particularly hard one. So much a matter of course was the presence of these negroes in Spain, that he never admits he had never duly considered their condition or the matter of their capture and sale. It thus fell, as will be later described, that he assented to the demands