are witnesses to prove that that is impossible" replied the
others, and the discussion which ensued awakened the clerigo who thus
received the disheartening tidings, which he was inclined to believe, of
the total destruction of his hopes. He afterwards attributed this
catastrophe to his own weakness in allowing himself to be drawn into a
partnership with godless men, whose sole object was to enrich themselves,
by which he had offended God and merited punishment. He would have done
better to keep to his original plan of forming a religious company of
Knights of the Golden Spur, who, aided by the friars, would have embarked
with him on the conversion of the natives without mingling any expectation
of profitable trade with their project. The struggle for immediate and
inordinate gain, in which the Spanish colonists were engaged, with its
slave raids, extermination of the Indians by selling them alcoholic
liquors and forcing them into the dangerous labours of mining and pearl
diving, was incompatible with such a colony as Las Casas designed to
found, and the agreement into which he entered with the Audiencia of
Hispaniola was bound to wreck his projects.

Had the ability of Las Casas to direct his undertaking and to govern men
been equal to his genius in the sphere of morals and intellect, and to the
eloquence of his advocacy, the realisation of his ideal of justice and
charity might have been assured. Certainly he contended against
overwhelming odds in Spain, the Bishop of Burgos, who controlled American
affairs, was implacably hostile; in America the colonial authorities and
the entire population barring the friars and a possible handful of his
friends, were vigilantly opposed to him; deceived and betrayed by his
Squire Berrio, he was disobeyed by De Soto and abandoned by his colonists,
while all hope of establishing friendly relations with the Indians in the
territory conceded to him was annihilated by the Spaniards at Cubagua,
whose aggressions kept the whole country in a state of alarm. These
untoward conditions, which no foresight on his part could have avoided,
were alone sufficient to explain the failure of his enterprise. His plans
seem, however, to have involved a contradiction of a fundamental law of
human progress which decrees the destruction of rudimentary forms of
civilisation when brought into contact with a higher one. Neither humane
civil legislation nor the higher principles of Christian charity have t