of all their kind.

Las Casas, being a native of Andalusia, was familiar with this
slave-trade, for Seville was well provided with domestic slaves, whose lot
was not a particularly hard one. So much a matter of course was the
presence of these negroes in Spain, that he never admits he had never duly
considered their condition or the matter of their capture and sale. It
thus fell, as will be later described, that he assented to the demands of
the Spanish colonists in the Indies for permission to import Africans from
Spain to take the place of the rapidly perishing Indians. In the
recommendation of this measure, several later historians pretended to
discover the origin of negro slavery in America, despite the authenticated
fact that sixteen years before Las Casas advised the importation of
negroes into the Indies, the slave-trade had been begun; nor is it
unlikely that other negroes had been brought to America by their Spanish
owners at a still earlier date. Although the original intention had been
to import only Christian negroes, this provision of the law had been
easily and persistently evaded, under the leniency and indifference of the
authorities, who connived at such profitable violation. It was contended
that the labour problem in the colonies admitted of no other solution; the
inefficient Indians were rapidly disappearing, of white labour there was
none, and, to respond to the demand for labourers, the Dominican Order, in
1510, sanctioned the importation of negroes direct from Africa, still
maintaining the proviso that all who were Jews or Mahometans should be
excluded.

Ovando had reported the Indians as so naturally indolent that no wages
could induce them to work. He represented them as flying from contact
with the Spaniards, leaving Queen Isabella to suppose that their avoidance
was due to a natural antipathy to white men. The Queen, in her zeal to
fulfil the conditions imposed on her conscience by the papal bull of
donation, was easily tricked by the representations of the Governor,
coinciding as they did with those of other advisers of influence and high
station, into assenting to the enforced labour of the Indians.

Her reason is explicitly stated to be "because we desire that the Indians
should be converted to our holy catholic faith and should learn doctrine."
For this motive, and with many restrictions as to the period of work and
the kinds of labour to be performed by the natives, the gentle tre