lf. While they
acknowledged the necessity of removing one evil, they were terrified by
the prospect of introducing another; and were, therefore, only able to
relieve their feelings by, lamenting, in the bitterness of their hearts,
that this traffic had ever been begun at all.

After the death of Cardinal Ximenes, the emperor Charles the Fifth, who
had come into power, encouraged the Slave Trade. In 1517, he granted a
patent to one of his Flemish favourites, containing an exclusive right
of importing four thousand Africans into America. But he lived long
enough to repent of what he had thus inconsiderately done; for in the
year 1542, he made a code of laws for the better protection of the
unfortunate Indians in his foreign dominions, and he stopped the
progress of African slavery by an order that all slaves in his American
islands should he made free. This order was executed by Pedro de la
Gasca. Manumission took place as well in Hispaniola as on the Continent;
but on the return of Gasca to Spain, and the retirement of Charles into
a monastery, slavery was revived.

It is impossible to pass over this instance of the abolition of slavery
by Charles, in all his foreign dominions, without some comments. It
shows him, first, to have been a friend both to the Indians and the
Africans, as a part of the human race; it shows he was ignorant of what
he was doing when he gave his sanction to this cruel trade; it shows
when legislators give one set of men undue power over another, how
quickly they abuse it, or he never would have found himself obliged, in
the short space of twenty-five years, to undo that which he had
countenanced as a great state measure; and while it confirms the former
lesson to statesmen of watching the beginnings or principles of things
in their political movements, it should teach them never to persist in
the support of evils, through the false shame of being obliged to
confess that they had once given them their sanction, nor to delay the
cure of them because, politically speaking, neither this nor that is the
proper season; but to do them away instantly, as there can only be one
fit or proper time in the eye of religion, namely, on the conviction of
their existence.

From the opinions of Cardinal Ximenes and of the emperor Charles the
Fifth, I hasten to that which was expressed much about the same time, in
a public capacity, by Pope Leo the Tenth. The Dominicans in Spanish
America, witnessing the cruel t