ans underwent no diminution. His writings were
extraordinarily luminous; and all he wrote treated of but one subject. He
himself declared that his sole reason for writing more than two thousand
pages in Latin was to proclaim the truth concerning Indians, who were
defamed by being represented as devoid of human understanding and brutes.
This defamation of an entire race outraged his sense of justice, and the
very excesses of the colonists provoked the reaction that was destined to
ultimately check them.

Of all his numerous works the two that are of great and permanent interest
to students of American history, the _Historia General_ and the _Historia
Apologetica de las Indias_, were originally designed to form a single
work. The writer informs us he began this work in 1527 while he resided
in the Dominican monastery near Puerto de Plata.

Fabie writes that his examination of the original manuscripts of the two
works preserved in the library of the Spanish Academy of History in
Madrid, shows that the first chapter of the _Apologetica_ was originally
the fifty-eighth of the _Historia General_. Prescott possessed a copy of
these manuscripts, which is believed to have been burned in Boston in
1872, and other copies still exist in America in the Congressional and
Lenox Libraries, and in the Hubert Howe Bancroft collection.

During his constant journeying to and fro, much of the material Las Casas
had collected for the _Historia General_ was lost and when he began to put
that work into its actual form--probably in 1552 or 1553--he was obliged to
rely on his memory for many of his facts, while others were drawn from the
_Historia del Almirante, Don Cristobal Colon_, written by the son of
Christopher Columbus, Fernando.

The first historian who had access to the original manuscript, in spite of
the instruction of Las Casas to his executors to withhold them from
publication for a period of forty years after his death, was Herrera, who
dipped plenis manibus into their contents, incorporating entire chapters
in his own work published in 1601. His book obtained a wide circulation
despite the fact that it was prohibited in Spain.

It was not until 1875-1876 that a complete edition of the _Historia
General_ and the _Apologetica_ was printed in Spanish. This work was
edited in five volumes by the Marques de la Fuensanta and Senor Jose
Sancho Rayon, and was issued by the Royal Academy of History in Madrid. A
Mexican edition o