ng human was foreign, and whose gift of universal
sympathy co-existed with an uncommon practical ability to devise
corrective reforms that commanded the attention and won the approval of
the foremost statesmen and moralists of his time. True, he also had a
vision of Utopia, and his flights of imaginative altruism frequently
elevated him so far above the realities of this world, that the
incorrigible frailties of human nature seemed to vanish from his
calculations, but when the rude awakening came, he neither forsook the
fight nor failed to profit by the bitter lesson.

When his dream of an ideal colony, peopled by perfect Christians labouring
for the conversion of model Indians, adorned with primitive virtues, was
dispelled, he girded his loins to meet his enemies with undiminished
courage, on the battle-ground they themselves had selected. His moral
triumph was complete, and he issued from every encounter victorious. The
fruits of his victories were not always immediate or satisfying, nor did
he live to see the practical application of all his principles, yet the
figure of this devoted champion of freedom stands on a pedestal of
enduring fame, of which the foundations rest on the eternal homage of all
lovers of justice and liberty, and it is the figure of a victor, who
served God and loved his fellow-men.

It will be seen in the following narrative, that monks of the Order of St.
Dominic were the first to defend the liberty of the Indian and his moral
dignity as a reasonable being, endowed with free will and understanding.
Associated in the popular conception with the foundation and extension of
the Inquisition, the Dominicans may appear in a somewhat unfamiliar guise
as torch-bearers of freedom in the vanguard of Spanish colonial expansion
in America, but such was the fact. History has made but scant and
infrequent mention of these first obscure heroes, who faced obloquy and
even risked starvation in the midst of irate colonists, whose avarice and
brutality they fearlessly rebuked in the name of religion and humanity:
they sank, after lives of self-immolation, into nameless graves, sometimes
falling victims to the blind violence of the very Indians whose cause they
championed--protomartyrs of liberty in the new world.

The conditions under which Las Casas and his co-workers laboured were
discouragingly adverse. The mailed conquerors and eager treasure-seekers
who followed in the wake of Columbus were consumed by