nfortunate wretch's head severed from his
body, so that the body dropped away from the chain without the march
being hindered. It is difficult to imagine a more callous or atrocious
proceeding than this, but undoubtedly financial considerations lay at
the bottom of it. The thing was done, perhaps, _pour encourager les
autres_, and certainly many a poor staggering wretch marched on mile
after mile, when under ordinary circumstances he would have dropped
exhausted at an earlier stage. Thus the last atom of physical energy was
wrenched by terror from the slaves--a species of economy which, if
worked out wholesale, may have proved sufficiently profitable from their
owner's point of view!

Long even after the passing of the pioneer _conquistadores_ the methods
of the Spanish Court encouraged abuses of authority and many acts of
tyranny. Officials, such as Governors and even Viceroys, were wont to
pay certain sums down for the transference of the tenure of office, and
it was then their task to wring as much from the governed territory as
possible in order that they might retire from the New World to the Old
the owners of vast fortunes.

To expect fair government under conditions such as these was to conceive
human beings on a higher plane than that on which they are wont to be
planned. Indeed, notwithstanding the atrocities and financial iniquities
which were rife throughout Spanish and Portuguese Colonies, to imagine
the various officials as necessarily inhuman and criminal is, of course,
absurd. Many of these were men of talent, and of merciful and gentle
disposition; but in many even of these cases the altogether
extraordinary influence and atmosphere of the Southern Continent ended
by driving them to acts from which in Europe they would have shrunk
whole-heartedly. The dispositions of the men were not invariably at
fault; but the system under which they worked was never anything else.

It is time, however, to forsake generalization, and to return to the
Spanish pioneers who first colonized Haiti, and then set foot on the
mainland itself. In the ill-fated island the drama, begun with the
advent of the Spaniards, was being continued in deeper and bloodier
shades. The royal edicts came pompously out from Spain, commanding that
the welfare of the Indians should be the first consideration on the part
of the Colonial Government; but the thunder of such edicts, worn out by
the voyage, died away ere they reached the island. Ova