and himself to manage, and promised, if she agreed, to make it
such an Ireland as had never been seen, which they probably would.
Elizabeth not consenting, Stukely turned Papist, transferred his
services to the Pope and Philip, and was preparing a campaign in Ireland
under the Pope's direction, when he was tempted to join Sebastian of
Portugal in the African expedition, and there got himself killed.

Stukely was a specimen of the foolish sort of the young Devonshire men;
Hawkins was exactly his opposite. He stuck to business, avoided
politics, traded with Spanish ports without offending the Holy Office,
and formed intimacies and connections with the Canary Islands
especially, where it was said 'he grew much in love and favour with the
people.'

At the Canaries he naturally heard much about the West Indies. He was
adventurous. His Canaries friends told him that negroes were great
merchandise in the Spanish settlements in Espanola, and he himself was
intimately acquainted with the Guinea coast, and knew how easily such a
cargo could be obtained.

We know to what the slave trade grew. We have all learnt to repent of
the share which England had in it, and to abhor everyone whose hands
were stained by contact with so accursed a business. All that may be
taken for granted; but we must look at the matter as it would have been
represented at the Canaries to Hawkins himself.

The Carib races whom the Spaniards found in Cuba and St. Domingo had
withered before them as if struck by a blight. Many died under the lash
of the Spanish overseers; many, perhaps the most, from the mysterious
causes which have made the presence of civilisation so fatal to the Red
Indian, the Australian, and the Maori. It is with men as it is with
animals. The races which consent to be domesticated prosper and
multiply. Those which cannot live without freedom pine like caged eagles
or disappear like the buffaloes of the prairies.

Anyway, the natives perished out of the islands of the Caribbean Sea
with a rapidity which startled the conquerors. The famous Bishop Las
Casas pitied and tried to save the remnant that were left. The Spanish
settlers required labourers for the plantations. On the continent of
Africa were another race, savage in their natural state, which would
domesticate like sheep and oxen, and learnt and improved in the white
man's company. The negro never rose of himself out of barbarism; as his
fathers were, so he remained from age to