nd sacrificed hecatombs of human victims to
gratify their greed for riches.

From the hour of his awakening, we follow him during sixty years of
ceaseless activity such as few men have ever displayed. His vehemence
tormented his adversaries beyond endurance, and they charged him with
stirring up dissensions and strife in the colonies, ruining trade,
discouraging emigration to the Indies, and, by his importunate and
reckless propaganda, with inciting the Indians to rebellion. Granting
that some abuses existed, they argued that his methods for redressing them
were more pernicious than the evils themselves; prudent measures should be
employed, not the radical and precipitate method of the fanatical friar,
and time would gradually do the rest. Men who argued such as the Bishop
of Burgos and Lope Conchillos, were large holders of encomienda
properties, who objected to having their sources of income disturbed. Las
Casas penetrated the flimsy disguise they sought to throw over their real
purpose, to smother the truth the better to consolidate and extend their
interests, and realising that his only hope of success lay in keeping the
subject always to the front, he pursued his inexorable course of teaching,
writing, journeying to America to impeach judges and excommunicate
refractory colonists, and thence back again to Spain to publish his
accusations broadcast and petition redress from the King and his Councils.

The most respectable of his contemporary opponents in the New World was
Toribio de Benevente, under his popular Indian name of Motolinia. In 1555,
Motolinia wrote a letter to in which he dealt severely with the
accusations of Las Casas, whom he described as a restless, turbulent man,
who wandered from one colony to another, provoking disturbances and
scandals. He confined himself to a general denial of the alleged
outrages, without attempting to refute them by presenting proofs of their
falsity, while his indignation was prompted by his patriotism. He was
shocked that a Spaniard should publish such accusations against his own
countrymen; things which would be read by foreigners and even by Indians,
and thus bring reproach on the Spanish national honour. He expressed
astonishment that the Emperor permitted the publication and circulation of
such books, taxing their author with wilful exaggeration and false
statements, and pointing out that the accusations brought more dishonour
on the monarch than on his subjects