ts 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 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 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 Christian