he branches of learning necessary to
complete the education of a young man of his social position and mental
capacity, were doubtless embraced in his course of study. His use of the
Latin tongue was fluent, though his style has been criticised as
cumbersome and wanting in elegance; certainly his writings abound in
diffuse generalities, a multiplicity of repetitions, and a vast array of
citations from Scripture and the classics which render his unexpurgated
manuscripts wearisome enough to modern readers. He shared the defects of
most of his contemporaries in this respect and followed the fashion common
in his times. The training he received in the Spanish schools and the
University, and which he afterwards perfected--as will be seen--by the
studies he resumed after his profession in the Dominican Order, rendered
formidable as an advocate one whom nature had endowed with a rare gift of
eloquence, a passionate temperament, and a robust physical constitution
which seems to have been immune to the ills and fatigues that assail less
favoured mortals. Gines de Sepulveda, whose forensic encounter with Las
Casas was one of the academic events of the sixteenth century, described
his adversary in a letter to a friend as "most subtle, most vigilant, and
most fluent, compared with whom Homer's Ulysses was inert and stammering."

The father of Las Casas accompanied Christopher Columbus on his second
voyage to America and acquired profitable interests in the island of
Hispaniola. He returned to Spain in 1496, bringing with him an Indian lad
whom he sent as a present to his son, who was then a student at Salamanca.

Bartholomew's ownership of this Indian boy was brief, owing to Queen
Isabella's intense displeasure when she learned that Columbus had brought,
and permitted to be brought back Indians, as slaves. Nothing sufficed to
appease the Queen's indignation that the Admiral should thus dispose of
her new subjects without her leave and authority, and a royal order was
published from Granada, where the court then was, commanding, under pain
of death, that all those who had brought Indians to Spain as slaves should
send them back to America. When Francisco de Bobadilla was sent in 1500
to Hispaniola to supersede Columbus as Governor, all these Indians
returned with him and Las Casas himself states, "Mine was of the number."

Thus strangely is the future apostle of freedom first introduced to our
notice in the guise of a slave-hol