attacked them upon equal terms of
arms, experience, and number, would have had a hard, and, peradventure,
a harder game to play than in any other war we have seen.

Why did not so noble a conquest fall under Alexander, or the ancient
Greeks and Romans; and so great a revolution and mutation of so many
empires and nations, fall into hands that would have gently levelled,
rooted up, and made plain and smooth whatever was rough and savage
amongst them, and that would have cherished and propagated the good seeds
that nature had there produced; mixing not only with the culture of land
and the ornament of cities, the arts of this part of the world, in what
was necessary, but also the Greek and Roman virtues, with those that were
original of the country? What a reparation had it been to them, and what
a general good to the whole world, had our first examples and deportments
in those parts allured those people to the admiration and imitation of
virtue, and had begotten betwixt them and us a fraternal society and
intelligence? How easy had it been to have made advantage of souls so
innocent, and so eager to learn, leaving, for the most part, naturally so
good inclinations before? Whereas, on the contrary, we have taken
advantage of their ignorance and inexperience, with greater ease to
incline them to treachery, luxury, avarice, and towards all sorts of
inhumanity and cruelty, by the pattern and example of our manners. Who
ever enhanced the price of merchandise at such a rate? So many cities
levelled with the ground, so many nations exterminated, so many millions
of people fallen by the edge of the sword, and the richest and most
beautiful part of the world turned upside down, for the traffic of pearl
and pepper? Mechanic victories! Never did ambition, never did public
animosities, engage men against one another in such miserable
hostilities, in such miserable calamities.

Certain Spaniards, coasting the sea in quest of their mines, landed in a
fruitful and pleasant and very well peopled country, and there made to
the inhabitants their accustomed professions: "that they were peaceable
men, who were come from a very remote country, and sent on the behalf of
the King of Castile, the greatest prince of the habitable world, to whom
the Pope, God's vicegerent upon earth, had given the principality of all
the Indies; that if they would become tributaries to him, they should be
very gently and courteously used"; at the same tim