two ruthless
passions--avarice and ambition.

Avarice and ambition alone, however, do not adequately explain their
undertakings, and we find among them a fierce zeal for Christian
propaganda strikingly disproportionate to their fitness to expound the
doctrines or illustrate the virtues of the Christian religion. They seem
to have frequently compounded for their sins of sensuality and their deeds
of blood by championing the unity and purity of the faith--two things that
were held to be of paramount importance, especially in Spain, where to be
outside formal communion with the Church was to be either a Jew or a
Mahometan, or in other words, an enemy of God.

Perverted as their conception of the true spirit of Christian propaganda
may appear to us, it may not be doubted that many of these men were
animated by honest missionary zeal and actually thought their singular
methods would procure the conversion of the Indians. On the other hand,
few of those who left Spain, animated by high motives, resisted the
prevalent seductions of avarice and ambition, amidst conditions so
singularly favourable to their gratification, and we find Las Casas
denouncing, as ridiculous and hypocritical, the pretensions to solicitude
for the spread of religion, under cover of which the colonists sought to
obtain royal sanction for the systems of slavery and serfage they had
inaugurated.

The essential differences observable in the Spanish and English colonies
in America are traceable to the directly contrary systems of government
prevailing at that time in the mother countries. All nations of Aryan
stock possessed certain fundamental features of government, inherited from
a common origin. Climatic and geographical conditions operated with
divers other influences to produce race characteristics, from which the
several nations of modern Europe were gradually evolved. Within each of
these nations, the inherited political principles common to all of them
were unequally and diversely developed. The forms of political liberty
continued to survive in Spain, but, under Charles V., the government
became, in practice, an absolute monarchy, the liberties of the Cortes and
the Councils being gradually overshadowed by the ever-growing prerogatives
of the Crown.

In England, on the contrary, the share of the people in the government
was, in spite of opposition, of steady growth, only interrupted by
occasional periods of suspension, while the power of