f finding the fifty knights. Las Casas, like many
enthusiasts and reformers, failed to reckon with the realities of human
nature. His colony was to be a Utopia, peopled by lofty-minded Spaniards,
who were free from the prevalent thirst for gold, and only preoccupied in
cultivating sentiments of the purest altruism: mixed with them were to be
gentle-mannered Indians, in whom shone all the qualities of primitive man,
unspoiled by contact with the evils of civilisation, and who were
thirsting to know the truth and to embrace it. These idyllic barbarians
were to furnish the human material on which the knights were to exercise
their virtues and all were to be thus united in bonds of loving fraternity
and disinterested industry, under the benign government of a dozen monks,
who had long since renounced this world and who would give their exclusive
attention to leading their flock from a terrestrial into the celestial
paradise. A Fra Angelico might have grouped these interesting types into a
picture of soul-stirring beauty. Even had the fifty been found, all with
the proper dispositions and in harmonious unanimity of purpose, there was
little chance that they would remain unaffected by the unbalancing and
corrupting influences of a new country, where they would be absolute
masters over an inferior race of people. Many excellent men of the highest
principles and best intentions went from Spain to America in those times,
but few resisted the temptations which beset them.

Las Casas kept his plan a profound secret until he had secured the
approbation of the new Chancellor, Gattinara, and that of several of the
influential Flemings. It was then laid before the India Council, where it
was met with a storm of objection and ridicule. It was promptly shelved,
and not all the urging of Las Casas, the discontent of the Flemings, nor
even the efforts of the Chancellor himself to induce the Bishop of Burgos
to study the matter, sufficed to have it taken into serious consideration.
The different features, as they became known, provoked mirth, and much fun
was made of the white robes, red crosses, and golden spurs of the knights.

Baffled by the inertia of the Council and the failure of his powerful
friends to obtain serious attention for his project, Las Casas had
recourse to other influences. The oppression of the Indians and the
violation of their rights as free men not only revolted the humanitarian
instincts of their Protector, they o