n of the mild and friendly character of the
natives of the islands was doubtless exact, but when he extends it to
include the fierce and warlike tribes of the mainland, his generalisations
are seen to be misleading. None of the peoples of Anahuac could be
truthfully described as "gentle lambs" or as "humble, submissive, and
docile, knowing no evil and neither possessing nor understanding the use
of weapons." Slavery was everywhere established, with its attendant
abuses and evils, and it was slavery that Las Casas combated. It must be
borne in mind that Las Casas was a man in whom humanitarianism
overshadowed every other sentiment, that he was of an ardent,
impressionable and imaginative temperament, with sensibilities of the most
delicate sort; moreover, he was an apostle, the defender of an oppressed
people, whom he had taken under his protection and whose cause it was the
mission of his life to sustain and defend. The violation of divine and
human justice had been erected into a system by the conquerors and
discoverers and nothing, in his eyes, could palliate the evils which that
system fostered, and by which the colonists prospered, while the native
races were dwindling to extinction. Beyond these primary facts, he
refused to see; of them, he had seen more than enough to inflame his
indignation and start him upon the crusade for which his iron
constitution, his superior intellectual powers, and his resistless
eloquence were alone adequate. He was frequently betrayed into invective,
and his denunciations are as fierce as language could make them, while the
energetic terms in which he depicts, in all their bald horror, the
revolting inhumanity of his countrymen provoke a shudder. The Brevissima
Relacion is not literature for sensitive readers.

CHAPTER XV. - THE BISHOPRICS OFFERED TO LAS CASAS. HIS CONSECRATION. HIS
DEPARTURE

Copies of the New Laws, accompanied by a royal letters of instruction,
were sent, not only to the viceroys, governors, and Audiencias in America,
but also to the priors of the different convents, so that the knowledge of
their provisions might be as widely diffused as possible and the vigilance
of the friars excited to see that they were obeyed both in the letter and
the spirit. Las Casas went from Valencia to Barcelona to thank the
Emperor, and while there, the royal secretary, Francisco de los Cobos,
waited on him one Sunday afternoon, bearing his appointment by the Emperor