proposed that labourers should
be induced to emigrate to the Indies, by granting that each person,
whether man or child, should have his expenses paid as far as Seville, the
place of embarkation, at the rate of half a real per day. While waiting
in Seville to start, the India House (Casa de Contractacion) was to lodge
and feed them, their passage to Hispaniola was to be given them and their
food furnished for one year. Any of the emigrants who, at the expiration
of the first year, found themselves incapacitated on account of the
climate to support themselves, should be entitled to further assistance in
the form of a royal loan. Lands were to be given them gratis and also the
requisite farming implements for working them, in which their rights as
owners should be permanent and hereditary. A more liberal scheme of
assisted emigration could hardly be imagined. Other inducements were held
out to attract emigrants under the new regulations and Las Casas acceded
to the request of certain of the colonists in Santo Domingo to ask the
King's consent to the importation of negro slaves to replace the Indians
who should be freed.

This recommendation cost Las Casas dearly enough and later exposed his
reputation unjustifiable attacks, some of which even represented him as
having _introduced_ negro slavery into America; others as having been
betrayed by blind zeal in favour of the Indians into promoting the
slave-trade at the expense of the Africans. No one more sincerely
deplored his course in this matter than he himself when he realised the
significance of what he had done, and the sincerity and humility of his
compunction should have sufficed to disarm his detractors. The most
formal accusation made by a reputable historian against Las Casas is found
in Robertson's _History of America_, vol. iii., Year 1517, in which he
charges the apostle of the Indians with having proposed to Cardinal
Ximenez to purchase a sufficient number of negroes from the Portuguese
settlements on the coast of Africa and to transport them to America in
order that they might be employed as slaves in working in the mines and
tilling the ground. Cardinal Ximenez however, when solicited to encourage
the commerce, peremptorily rejected the proposition because he perceived
the iniquity of reducing one race of men to slavery when he was consulting
about the means of restoring liberty to another. But Las Casas, from the
inconsistency natural to men who hurr