y with headlong impetuosity towards a
favourite point, was incapable of making the distinction. While he
contended earnestly for the liberty of the people born in one quarter of
the globe, he laboured to enslave the inhabitants of another region and in
the warmth of his zeal to save the Americans from the yoke, pronounced it
to be lawful and expedient to impose one still heavier on the African.

Language could hardly more completely travesty the facts, for Las Casas
neither "laboured to enslave the inhabitants of another region" nor did he
"pronounce it lawful" to increase slavery amongst the Africans. The moral
aspect of the question of slavery was not under consideration and the
recommendation of Las Casas is seen upon examination to reduce itself to
this: he advised that Spanish colonists in America should be allowed the
privilege, common in Spain and Portugal, of employing negro slave labour
on their properties. Since Spaniards might hold African slaves in Spain,
it implied no approval of slavery as an institution, to permit them to do
the same in the colonies. Las Casas was engaged in defending a hitherto
free people from the curse of a peculiarly cruel form of slavery, but had
he regarded the institution as justifiable in itself, he would have
modified the ardour of his opposition to its extension.

The truth plainly appears in the chronicles of the times and establishes
beyond cavil exactly what Las Casas did, and under what circumstances and
for what purposes he made the recommendation which he never afterwards
ceased to deplore. Retributive justice has followed these attempts of
several lesser contemporaries of Robertson to asperse the character of one
of the purest, noblest, and most humane of men, and while discredit has
overtaken the inventors and publishers of these falsehoods, the
investigations of impartial historians, provoked by their enormity, have
resulted in banishing such fables from historical controversy.

The original basis of the charge that Las Casas favoured the introduction
of negro slavery into America is a passage in Herrera's _Historia de las
Indias Occidentals_, written in 1598, thirty-two years after the death of
Las Casas, and which reads as follows:

"As the licentiate Las Casas encountered much opposition to the plan he
had formed for helping the Indians and seeing that the opinions he had
published had produced no result, in spite of the extraordinary credit he
enjoyed with th