ising the Indians, a task which Spaniards finally
accomplished. The Spanish sovereigns were honestly desirous of protecting
their new subjects, and the injustice inflicted on the latter was done in
defiance of the laws they enacted, as well as of public opinion in Spain,
which condemned it as severely as could the most advanced humanitarian
sentiment of our own times.

Las Casas voiced this condemnation and organised a masterly campaign of
education on the subject of the proper method of dealing with the Indians.
He suffered and endured for their sakes, while the men whose selfish and
inhuman undertakings he thwarted poured the vilest abuse and calumny upon
him. Nature had mercifully endowed him with no sensitiveness save for the
sufferings of the oppressed, and he was as much a born fighter as the
fiercest conqueror who ever landed in Spanish America. He waged a moral
battle, animated by only the noblest motives, and in his damning
arraignment of his countrymen, he eschewed personalities and, with a
charity as rare as it was becoming to his sacerdotal character, he
occupied himself exclusively with the principles at stake, leaving the
punishment of the criminals to the final justice of God.

The records of the earliest peoples of whom history preserves
knowledge--Chaldeans, Egyptians, Phenicians, and Arabians--show that slavery
has existed the remotest antiquity. Slavery was the common fate of
prisoners of war in the time of Homer; Alexander sold the inhabitants of
Thebes, and the Spartans reduced the entire population of Helos to
servitude, so that Helot came to be synonymous with slave, while one of
the laws inscribed on the Twelve Tables of Rome gave a creditor the right
to sell an insolvent debtor into slavery to satisfy his claim. Wealthy
Romans frequently possessed slaves, over whose lives and fortunes the
owners were absolute masters.

Christianity first taught the unity and equality of mankind; salvation was
for bond and free, for Jew and Gentile; the immortality of each human soul
was affirmed; each man's body was defined of the Holy Ghost and a new
dignity was conferred by these novel doctrines on universal mankind, which
the lowly shared equally with the mighty. The Christian conception of
liberty and equality however, referred more to the moral than to the
material order. "The truth shall make you free." It was not subversive
of existing mundane conditions, but taught the duty of rendering Caesar