For several weeks longer the Indians blockaded Cusco, and the Spaniards were occasionally straitened in regard to supplies; but always at the time of new moon the Indians withdrew for the performance of certain religious ceremonies, and the Spaniards were able then to replenish their exhausted granaries. The siege languished, and finally ceased, but not till the Spaniards had practised for some time the cruel measure of putting to death every Indian woman whom they seized.
But now misery in a new form came upon this unhappy country. Fierce strifes arose among the conquerors themselves. Pizarro had gained higher honours and ampler plunder thanhad fallen to the share of his partner Almagro, and it does not seem that he was scrupulous in his fulfilment of the contract by whose terms an equal division of spoil was fixed. Almagro appeared on the scene with an overwhelming force, to assert his own rights. For ten or twelve years from this time the history of Peru represents to us a country ungoverned and in confusion; a native population given over to slavery, and wasting under the exactions of ruthless task-masters; fierce wars between the conquerors devastating the land.1537 A.D.Tranquillity was not restored till a large portion of the native population had perished, and till all the chiefs of this marvellous conquest had died as miserably as the Indians they had destroyed. Almagro entered Cusco, and made prisoners of the two brothers Fernando and Gonzalo Pizarro; whom, however, he soon liberated.1538 A.D.He, in turn, fell into the hands of Fernando, by whose orders he was brought for trial before a tribunal set up for that occasion in Cusco. He was condemned to die;—partly for his “notorious crimes;” partly because, as the council deemed, his death “would prevent many other deaths.” On the same day the old man, feeble, decrepit, and begging piteously for life, was strangled in prison and afterwards beheaded. Immediately after this occurrence Fernando Pizarro sailed for Spain, where his enemies had gained the ear of the King. Fernando was imprisoned, and was not released for twenty-three years, till his long life of a hundred years was near its close.1541 A.D.Three years after the death of Almagro, the Marquis Pizarro, now a man of seventy, was set upon in his own house in Lima and murdered by a band of soldiers dissatisfied with the portion of spoil which had fallen to their share. The close of that marvellous career was in strange contrast to its brilliant course. After a stout defence against overwhelming force, a fatal wound in the throat prostrated the brave old man. He asked for a confessor, and received for answer a blow on the face. With his finger hetraced the figure of a cross on the ground, and pressed his dying lips on the hallowed symbol. Thus passed the stern conqueror and destroyer of the Peruvian nation.1548 A.D.A few years after the assassination of the Marquis, his brother Gonzalo was beheaded for having resisted the authority of Spain; and he died so poor, as he himself stated on the scaffold, that even the garments he wore belonged to the executioner who was to cut off his head. The partnership which was formed at Panama a quarter of a century before, had brought wealth and fame, but it conducted those who were chiefly concerned in it to misery and shameful death.
From Peru the tide of Spanish conquest flowed southward to Chili. The river Plate was explored; Buenos Ayres was founded; and communication was opened from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Forty years after the landing of Columbus, the margins of the continent bordering on the sea had been subdued and possessed, and some progress had been made in gaining knowledge of the interior. There had been added to the dominions of Spain vast regions, whose coast-line on the west stretched from Mexico southward for the distance of six thousand miles—regions equal in length to the whole of Africa, and largely exceeding in breadth the whole of the Russian Empire. It has now to be shown how ill-prepared was Spain for this sudden and enormous addition to her responsibilities—how huge have been the evils which her possession of the new continent inflicted upon mankind.
The native populations with which the Spaniards were brought into contact differed widely, in respect of the degree of civilization to which they had attained, from the Indians of the Northern Continent. The first colonists of Virginia, Massachusetts, and the St. Lawrence valley found the soil possessed by fierce tribes, wholly without knowledge of the arts of civilized life. The savages of the north supported themselves almost entirely by the chase, regarding agriculture with contempt; their dwellings were miserable huts; their clothing was the skins of the beasts which they slew; they were without fixed places of abode, and wandered hither and thither in the forest as their hopes of success in hunting directed. They left no traces of their presence on the land which they inhabited—no cleared forest, nor cultivated field, nor fragment of building. They were still savage and debased in a degree almost as extreme as humanity has ever been known to reach.
The inhabitants of the islands where Columbus first landed were the least civilized of the southern races. But the genial conditions of climate under which they lived, and the abundance with which nature surrounded them, seemed to have softened their dispositions and made them gentle and inoffensive and kind. They were scarcely clothed at all, but they lived in well-built villages and cultivated the ground. Their wantswere few; and as the spontaneous bounty of nature for the most part supplied these, they spent their days in simple, harmless indolence. Land among them was “as common as the sun and water.” They gave willingly, and without hope of recompense, any of their possessions which visitors desired to obtain. To the pleased eye of Columbus they seemed “to live in the golden world without toil; living in open gardens, not intrenched with dikes, divided by hedges, or defended with walls.”
The natives of Central America were of a fiercer character and more accustomed to war than those of the islands. They had also made greater progress in the arts; and the ornaments of gold which the Spaniards received from them evidenced considerable skill in working the precious metals. They wore mantles of cotton cloth, and must, therefore, have mastered the arts of spinning and weaving. Their achievements in architecture and sculpture still remain to excite the wonder of the antiquary. Here and there, wrapped almost impenetrably in the profuse vegetation of the forest, there have been found ruined cities, once of vast extent. These cities must have been protected by great walls—lofty, massive, skilfully built. They contained temples, carefully plastered and painted; and numerous altars and images, whose rich sculptures still attest the skill of the barbarian artist.
It was, however, in the ancient monarchies of Mexico and Peru that American civilization reached its highest development. The Mexican people lived under a despotic Government; but their rights were secured by a gradation of courts, with judges appointed by the Crown, or in certain cases elected by the people themselves, and holding their offices for life. Evidence was given on oath, and the proceedings of the courts were regularly recorded. A judge who accepted bribes was put to death. The marriage ceremony was surrounded with the sanctions of religion, and divorce was granted only as theresult of careful investigation by a tribunal set up for that special business. Slavery existed; but it was not hereditary, and all Mexicans were born free. Taxation was imposed according to fixed rates, and regular accounts were kept by an officer appointed to that service. The Mexicans had made no inconsiderable progress in manufactures. They wove cotton cloths of exceedingly fine texture, and adorned them with an embroidery of feather-work marvellously beautiful. They produced paper from the leaf of the Mexican aloe; they extracted sugar from the stalk of the Indian corn. They made and beautifully embellished vessels of gold and silver; they produced in abundance vessels of crystal and earthenware for domestic use. They had not attained to the use of iron; but they understood how to harden copper with an alloy of tin till it was fitted both for arms and for mechanical tools. Agriculture was their most honourable employment, and was followed by the whole population excepting the nobles and the soldiers. It was prosecuted with reasonable skill—irrigation being practised, land being suffered to lie fallow for the recovery of its exhausted energies; laws being enacted to prevent the destruction of the woods. The better class of dwellings in cities were well-built houses of stone and lime; the streets were solidly paved; public order was maintained by an effective police. Europe was indebted to the Mexicans for its knowledge of the cochineal insect, whose rich crimson was much used for dyeing fine cotton cloths. The Mexicans were without knowledge of the alphabet till the Spaniards brought it; but they practised with much skill an ingenious system of hieroglyphic painting, which served them fairly well for the transmission of intelligence. Montezuma was informed of the coming of the Spaniards by paintings which represented their ships and horses and armour.
Notwithstanding the industrial progress of this remarkable people, their social condition was, in some respects, inexpressiblydebased. It was their custom to offer to their gods multitudes of human sacrifices. Their most powerful motive in going to war was to obtain prisoners for this purpose; and the prowess of a warrior was judged by the number of victims whom he had secured and brought to the sacrificing priest. Wealthy Mexicans were accustomed to give banquets, from which they sought to gain social distinction by the culinary skill exercised and the large variety of delicacies presented. One of the dishes on which the cook put forth all his powers was the flesh of a slave slaughtered for the occasion.[30]The civilization of the Mexicans was fatally obstructed by their religion. The priesthood was numerous, and possessed of commanding authority. The people regarded the voice of the priest as that of the deity to which he ministered, and they lived under the power of a bloody and degrading superstition. Here, as it has been elsewhere, a religion which in its origin was merely a reflection of the good and the evil existing in the character of the people, stamped divine sanction upon their errors, and thus rendered progress impossible.
For two or three centuries before her fall, Peru had constantly extended her dominion over her less civilized neighbours. Her supremacy was widely recognized, and many of the surrounding tribes were persuaded to accept peacefully the advantages which her strong and mild government afforded. It was her wise policy to admit her new subjects, whether they were gained by negotiation or by force, to an equality of privilege with the rest of the people, and to present inducements which led quickly to the adoption of her own religion and language. By measures such as these the empire was consolidated while it was extended, and its tranquillity was seldom marred by internal discontent. When the Peruvian empire received its sudden death-blow from the Spanish conquerors, it was doingthe useful work which England has done in India, and Russia in Central Asia—subjugating the savage nations whose territories lay around and imparting to them the benefits of a civilization higher than their own.
Peru was governed according to the principles of Communism. A portion of land was set apart for the Sun—the national deity—and its revenues were expended in the support of temples and a priesthood. A second portion belonged to the Inca—the child and representative of the Sun. The remainder was divided annually among the people. All shared equally. When a young man married he received a fixed addition; when children were born to him further increase was granted. He might not sell his land or purchase that of his neighbour; he could not improve his condition and become rich. But neither could he suffer from want; for the Government provided for his support if he could not provide for it himself, and poverty was unknown. It was equally impossible to be idle, for the Government enforced the exercise of industrious habits.
Agriculture was the national employment. To illustrate its dignity, the Inca was wont on great public occasions to put his own divine hand to the plough and reveal himself to his people in the act of turning over the fruitful sod. The Peruvians were acquainted with the virtues of the guano, which was piled in mountains upon the islands lying along their coasts, and were careful to protect by stern laws the sea-fowl to which they were indebted for the precious deposit. Between the sea and the mountains there stretched a level expanse on which rain never fell. This otherwise profitless region was nourished into high fertility by an elaborate system of irrigation. On the mountains the solid rock was hewn into terraces and covered with soil laboriously carried up from below. In the valleys flourished the tropical banana and cassava tree. On the lower ranges of the mountains grew the maize. At a greater height appeared the American aloe, the tobacco plant,and the coca, the favourite narcotic of the Indian. Yet further up the mountain-side Europeans first saw the potato, then largely cultivated in Peru, and destined at a later time to attain vast social and even political significance in the Old World.
The public works of Peru furnish striking evidence of the industry of the people and the enlightened views of their rulers. Two great roads traversed the country from north to south. One of these, whose length is estimated at fifteen hundred miles, ascended the mountains and passed along the plateau, at a height occasionally of twelve thousand feet; the other ran parallel in the plain which was bordered by the sea. The construction of the upper road was necessarily a work of prodigious difficulty. Vast ravines had to be filled with solid masonry; lofty masses of rock had to be pierced by galleries or surmounted by a long succession of steps; bridges formed of osiers twisted into huge cables had to be hung across rivers. The roadway was formed of massive paving-stones and of concrete; and although no wheeled vehicle or beast of burden other than the llama passed over it, the Spaniards remarked with grateful surprise on its perfect smoothness. There was no road in Europe so well built and so well maintained. Since the conquest it has been suffered to fall into ruin; but here and there, where mountain-torrents have washed the soil from underneath, massive fragments of this ancient work are still to be seen hanging in air, so tenacious were the materials used, so indestructible was the structure produced.
The Peruvians had gained no inconsiderable skill in textile manufacture. Cotton grew abundantly on the sultry plains. Large supplies of wool of extreme fineness were obtained from the Peruvian sheep. Two varieties of these—the llama and the alpaca—were domesticated and carefully watched over by Government officers. Two other varieties roamed wild upon the mountains. But once in the year a great hunt was organized under royalauthority; the wanderers were caught and shorn; and the wool thus obtained was carried to the royal store-house. Thence it was given out to the people, to be woven into garments for themselves and for the Inca. The beauty of the fabrics which were produced awakened the admiration of the Spaniards, as greatly superior to the finest products of European looms.
The sons of the great nobles were instructed in the simple learning of the country, in seminaries erected for that purpose; beyond the narrow circle of the aristocracy education did not pass. Some of these youths were to be priests, and they were taught the complicated ritual of the national religion. Some would have to do with the administration of public affairs, and these were required to acquaint themselves with the laws. Many would become subordinate officers of Government, having charge of revenues; recording births and deaths—for the registration system of the Peruvians was painstaking and accurate; taking account of the stores received and given out at the royal magazines. These were instructed in the Peruvian method of keeping records—by means of knots tied upon a collection of threads of different colours. The education of the nobles did not extend further, for little more was known; and as the Peruvian intellect was devoid of energy and the power to originate, the boundaries of knowledge were not extending. The masses of the people lived in contented ignorance; pleased with the Government which directed all their actions and supplied all their wants; enjoying a fulness of comfort such as has seldom been enjoyed by any population; without ambition, without progress, but also without repining; wholly satisfied with the position in which they were born and in which they lived; experiencing no rise and no fall from one generation to another.
Such were the people upon whom there now fell, with awful suddenness, the blight of Spanish conquest. Their numberscannot be told with any approach to accuracy, for the estimates left by the conquerors are widely diverse. The population of the city of Mexico is set down by some writers at sixty thousand; by others, with equal opportunity for observation, at six hundred thousand; and a divergence equally baffling attends most of the statements which have been supplied to us. There is, however, abundant evidence that the Southern Continent was the home of a very numerous population. The means of subsistence were easily obtained; in Peru marriage was compulsory; the duration of life and the increase of population were not restrained, as in Northern America, by severity of climate and the toil necessarily undergone in the effort to procure food. Cortes, on his way to Mexico, came to a valley where for a distance of twelve miles there was a continuous line of houses. Everywhere near the coast the Spaniards found large villages, and often towns of considerable size. Peru was undoubtedly a populous State; and the great plateau over which Mexico ruled contained many tributary cities of importance. One Spanish writer estimates that forty million of Indians had perished within half a century after the conquest;—beyond doubt an extravagant estimate, but the use of such figures by an intelligent observer is in itself evidence that the continent was inhabited by a vast multitude of human beings.
The power of resistance of this great population was wholly insignificant. The men were not wanting in courage; the Peruvians, at least, were not without a rude military discipline: but they were inferior in physical strength to their assailants; they were without horses and without iron; their solitary hope lay in their overwhelming numbers. They were powerfully reinforced by the diseases which struck down the invaders; but their own poor efforts at defence, heroic and self-devoted as these were, sufficed to inflict only trivial injury upon their well-defended conquerors. A vast continent, with manymillions of men ready to die in defence of their homes, fell before the assault of enemies who never at any point numbered over a few hundreds.
The invaders claimed the continent and all that it held as the property of the Spanish Sovereign, upon whom these great possessions had been liberally bestowed by the Pope. The grant of his Holiness conveyed not only the lands but also the infidels by whom they were inhabited; and the Spaniards assumed without hesitation that the Indians belonged to them, and were rightfully applicable to any of their purposes. Upon this doctrine their early relations with the natives were based. The demand for native labour was immediate and urgent. There was gold to be found in the rivers and mountains of the islands, and the natives were compelled to labour in mining—a description of work unknown to them before. There was no beast of burden on all the continent, excepting the llama, which the Peruvians had trained to carry a weight of about a hundred pounds; but the Spaniards had much transport work to do. When an army moved, its heavy stores had to be carried for great distances, and frequently by ways which a profuse tropical vegetation rendered almost impassable. Occasionally it happened that the materials for vessels were shaped out far from the waters on which they were to sail. Very often it pleased the lordly humour of the conquerors to be borne in litters on men’s shoulders when they travelled. The Indian became the beast of burden of the Spaniard. Every little army was accompanied by its complement of Indian bearers, governed by the lash held in brutal hands. When Cortes prepared at Tlascala the materials of the fleet with which he besieged Mexico—when Vasco Nuñez prepared on the Atlantic the materials of ships which were to be launched on the Pacific, the deadly work of transport was performed by Indians. The native allies were compelled to rebuild the city of Mexico, carrying or dragging the stones and timber from a distance, suffering all the while the miseries offamine. Indians might often have been seen bearing on bleeding shoulders the litter of a Spaniard—some ruffian, it might well happen, fresh from the jails of Castile.
The Indians—especially those of the islands, feeble in constitution and unaccustomed to labour—perished in multitudes under these toils. The transport of Vasco Nuñez’s ships across the isthmus cost five hundred Indian lives. Food became scarce, and the wretched slaves who worked in the mines of Hispaniola were insufficiently fed. The waste of life among the miners was enormous. All around the great mines unburied bodies polluted the air. Many sought refuge in suicide from lives of intolerable misery. Mothers destroyed their children to save them from the suffering which they themselves endured.
Nor was it only excessive labour which wasted the native population. The slightest outrage by Indians was avenged by indiscriminate massacre. Constant expeditions went out from Spanish settlements to plunder little Indian towns. When resistance was offered, the inhabitants were slaughtered. If the people gave up their gold and their slender store of provisions, many of them were subjected to torture in order to compel further disclosures. Vasco Nuñez, who was deemed a humane man, wrote that on one expedition he had hanged thirty chiefs, and would hang as many as he could seize: the Spaniards, he argued, being so few, they had no other means of securing their own safety. Columbus himself, conscious that the gold he had been able to send fell short of the expectation entertained in Spain, remitted to the King five hundred Indians, whom he directed to be sold as slaves and their price devoted to the cost of his majesty’s wars. Yet further: there came in the train of the conquerors the scourge of small-pox, which swept down the desponding and enfeebled natives in multitudes whose number it is impossible to estimate. The number of Indian orphans furnished terrible evidence of the rigour of the Spaniards.“They are numerous,” writes one merciful Spaniard, “as the stars of heaven and the sands of the sea.” And yet the conquerors often slew children and parents together.
It was on the islanders that these appalling calamities first fell. They fell with a crushing power which speedily amounted to extermination. When Columbus first looked upon the luxuriant beauty of Hispaniola, and received the hospitality of its gentle and docile people, that ill-fated island contained a population of at least a million. Fifteen years later the number had fallen to sixty thousand. The inhabitants of other islands were kidnapped and carried to Hispaniola, to take up the labours of her unhappy people, and to perish as they had done. In thirty years more there were only two hundred Indians left on this island. It fared no better with many of the others. At a later period, when most of these possessions fell into the hands of the English, no trace of the original population was left. On the mainland, too, enormous waste of life occurred. No estimate lower than ten million has ever been offered of the destruction of natives by the Spanish conquest, and this number is probably far within the appalling truth. Human history, dishonoured as it has ever been by the record of blood causelessly and wantonly shed, has no page so dreadful as this.
But although there prevailed among the conquerors a terrible unanimity in this barbarous treatment of the natives, there were some who stood forward with noble courage and persistency in defence of the perishing races.1502 A.D.Most prominent among these was Bartholomew de Las Casas, a young priest, who came to the island of Hispaniola ten years after Columbus had landed there. He was a man of eager, fervid nature, but wise and good—self-sacrificing, eloquent, bold to attack the evils which surrounded him, nobly tenacious in his life-long efforts to protect the helpless nations whom his countrymen were destroying. He came to Hispaniola at atime when the island was being rapidly depopulated, and he witnessed the methods by which this result was accomplished.1511 A.D.Some years later he was sent for to assist in the pacification of Cuba. In the discharge of this task he travelled much in the island, baptizing the children. One morning he and his escort of a hundred men halted for breakfast in the dry bed of a stream. The men sharpened their swords upon stones which abounded there suitable for that purpose. A crowd of harmless natives had come out from a neighbouring town to gaze upon the horses and arms of the strangers. Suddenly a soldier, influenced, as it was believed, by the devil, drew his sword and cut down one of the Indians. In an instant the diabolic suggestion communicated itself to the whole force, and a hundred newly-sharpened swords were hewing at the half-naked savages. Before Las Casas could stay this mad slaughter the ground was cumbered with heaps of dead bodies. The good priest knew the full horrors of Spanish conquest.
When the work of pacification in Cuba was supposed to be complete, Las Casas received from the Governor certain lands, with a suitable allotment of Indians. He owns that at that time he did not greatly concern himself about the spiritual condition of his slaves, but sought, as others did, to make profit by their labour. It was his duty, however, occasionally to say mass and to preach.1514 A.D.Once, while preparing his discourse, he came upon certain passages in the book of Ecclesiasticus in which the claims of the poor are spoken of, and the guilt of the man who wrongs the helpless. Years before, he had heard similar views enforced by a Dominican monk, whose words rose up in his memory now. He stood, self-convicted, a defrauder of the poor. He yielded a prompt obedience to the new convictions which possessed him, and gave up his slaves; he laboured to persuade his countrymen that they endangered their souls by holding Indians in slavery. His remonstrancesavailed nothing, and he resolved to carry the wrongs of the Indians to Spain and lay them before the King.1515 A.D.Ferdinand—old and feeble, and now within a few weeks of the grave—heard him with deep attention as he told how the Indians were perishing in multitudes, without the faith and without the sacraments; how the country was being ruined; how the revenue was being diminished. The King would have tried to redress these vast wrongs, and fixed a time when he would listen to a fuller statement; but he died before a second interview could be held.
The wise Cardinal Ximenes, who became Regent of the kingdom at Ferdinand’s death, entered warmly into the views of Las Casas. He asserted that the Indians were free, and he framed regulations which were intended to secure their freedom and provide for their instruction in the faith. He chose three Jeronymite fathers to administer these regulations; for the best friends of the Indians were to be found among the monks and clergy. He sent out Las Casas with large authority, and named him “Protector of the Indians.”1516 A.D.But in a few months the Cardinal lay upon his death-bed, and when Las Casas returned to complain of obstructions which he encountered, this powerful friend of the Indians was almost unable to listen to the tale of their wrongs. The young King Charles assumed the reins of government, and became absorbed in large, incessant, desolating European wars. The home interests of the Empire were urgent; the colonies were remote; the settlers were powerful and obstinate in maintaining their right to deal according to their own pleasure with the Indians. For another twenty-five years the evils of the American colonies lay unremedied; the cruelty under which the natives were destroyed suffered no effective restraint.
The ruin which fell on the native population of the New World was at no time promoted by the rulers of Spain; it was the spontaneous result of the unhappy circumstances which the conquest produced. In early life Columbus had been familiarized with the African slave-trade; and he carried with him to the world which he discovered the conviction that not only the lands he found, but all the heathens who inhabited them, became the absolute property of the Spanish Sovereigns.1495 A.D.He had not been long in Hispaniola till he imposed upon all Indians over fourteen years of age a tribute in gold or in cotton. But it was found impossible to collect this tribute; and Columbus, desisting from the attempt to levy taxes upon his subjects, ordained that, instead, they should render personal service on the fields and in the mines of the Spaniards.1496 A.D.Columbus had authority from his Government to reward his followers with grants of lands, but he had yet no authority to include in his gift those who dwelt upon the lands. But of what avail was it to give land if no labour could be obtained? Columbus, on his own responsibility, made to his followers such grants of Indians as he deemed reasonable. He intended that these grants should be only temporary, till the condition of the country should be more settled; but the time never came when those who received consented to relinquish them.
A few years later, when the Indians had gained some experience of the ways of the Spaniards, they began to shun the presence of their new masters. They shunned them, wrote Las Casas, “as naturally as the bird shuns the hawk.” It was reported by the Governor, Ovando, that this policy interfered with the spread of the faith as well as with the prosperity of the settlements.1503 A.D.He received from the Spanish Monarchs authority to compel the Indians to work for such wages as he chose to appoint, and also to attend mass and receive instruction. The liberty of the Indians was asserted; but in presence of the conditions under which they were now to live, liberty was impossible. Ovando lost no time in acting on his instructions. He distributed large numbers of Indians, with no other obligation imposed upon those who received them than that the savages should be taught the holy Catholic faith.
Nov. 1504 A.D.Next year the good Queen Isabella died. She had loved the Indians, and her influence sufficed to restrain the evils which were ready to burst upon them. Her death greatly emboldened the colonists in their oppressive treatment of their unhappy servants. The search for gold had become eminently successful, and there arose a vehement demand for labourers. King Ferdinand was a reasonably humane man, but the welfare of his Indian subjects did not specially concern him. There were many men who had done him service which called for acknowledgment. The King had little money to spare, but a grant of Indians was an acceptable reward. That was the coin in which the claims of expectants were now satisfied. The King soothed his conscience by declaring that such grants were not permanent, but might be revoked at his pleasure. Meantime the population of the islands wasted with terrible rapidity.
In course of time the colonists desired that their rights should be placed upon a more stable footing, and they sentmessengers to the King to request that their Indians should be given to them in perpetuity, or at least for two or three generations.1512 A.D.Their prayer was not granted; but the King summoned a Junta, and the Indians became, for the first time, the subjects of formal legislation. The legality of the system under which they were forced to labour was now clearly established. In other respects the laws were intended, for the most part, to ameliorate the condition of the labourers. But it was only at a few points the new regulations could be enforced. By most of the colonists they were disregarded.
Thirty miserable years passed, during which, although the incessant labours of Las Casas gained occasional successes, the colonists exercised their cruel pleasure upon the native population. The islands were almost depopulated, and negroes were being imported from Africa to take the place of the labourers who had been destroyed. Mexico had fallen, with a slaughter which has been estimated by millions. Of the numerous cities which Cortes passed on his way to Mexico, “nothing,” says a report addressed to the King, “is now remaining but the sites.” In Peru it was asserted by an eye-witness that one-half or two-thirds of men and cattle had been destroyed. The survivors of these unparalleled calamities had fallen into a condition of apathy and indifference from which it was impossible to arouse them. The conquerors had not yet penetrated deeply into the heart of the continent; but they had visited its coasts, and wherever they had gone desolation attended their steps.
1542 A.D.The Spanish Government had made many efforts to curb the lawless greed and cruelty of the conquerors. Now a Junta was summoned and a new code of laws enacted. Again the freedom of the Indians was asserted, and any attempt to enslave them forbidden. The colonists had assumed that the allotments of Indians made to them were not subject to recall. But it was now declared that all such allotmentswere only for the single life of the original possessor; at his death they reverted to the Crown. Yet further: compulsory service was abolished, and a fixed tribute took its place.
Official persons were sent to enforce these laws in Mexico and Peru. But the Junta had not sufficiently considered the temper of the provinces. It was found that Mexico would not receive the new laws, which were therefore referred to the Government for reconsideration. The Viceroy, who carried the laws to Peru, after bringing the country to the verge of rebellion, was taken prisoner by the local authorities and shipped homewards to Spain. The laws which the high-handed conquerors thus decisively rejected were soon after annulled by an order of the King.
The Spanish Government was thus baffled in its efforts to terminate the ruinous control which Spanish colonists exercised over the natives. The duration of that control was gradually extended. In seventeen years it crept up to three lives. Fifty years later, after many years of agitation, the fourth life was gained. Twenty years after, the still unsatisfied heirs of the conquerors demanded that a fifth life should be included in the grant; but here they were obliged to accept a compromise. The system continued in force for two hundred and fifty years, and was not abolished till near the close of the eighteenth century.
But although the Government yielded to the clamour of its turbulent subjects, in so far as the prolongation of Spanish control was concerned, it was inflexible in its determination to modify the quality of that control. The prohibition of compulsory labour was firmly adhered to. The legal right of the conquerors was restricted to the exaction of a fixed tribute from their subject Indians. This tribute must be paid in money or in some product of the soil, but not compounded for by personal service. The Indians might hire themselves as labourers, under certain regulations and for certain specified wages, but this mustbe their own voluntary act. For many years the Spaniards yielded a most imperfect obedience to these salutary restrictions, but gradually, as the machinery of administration spread itself over the continent, the law was more strictly enforced.
The Spanish Government is entitled to the praise of having done its utmost to protect the native populations. In the early days of the conquest, Queen Isabella watched over their interests with a special concern for their conversion to the true faith. As years passed, and the gigantic dimensions of the evil which had fallen on the Indians became apparent, her successors attempted, by incessant legislation, to stay the progress of the ruin which was desolating a continent. None of the other European Powers manifested so sincere a purpose to promote the welfare of a conquered people. The rulers of Spain were continually enacting laws which erred only in being more just and wise than the country in its disordered condition was able to receive. They continually sought to protect the Indians by regulations extending to the minutest detail, and conceived in a spirit of thoughtful and even tender kindness.[31]In all that the Government did or endeavoured to do it received eager support from the Church, whose record throughout this terrible history is full of wise foresight and noble courage in warning and rebuking powerful evil-doers. The Popes themselves interposed their authority to save the Indians. Las Casas, when he became a bishop, ordered his clergy to withhold absolution from men who held Indians as slaves.1520 A.D.Once the King’s Preachers, of whom there were eight, presented themselves suddenly before the Council of the Indies and sternly denounced the wrongs inflicted upon the natives, whereby, said they, the Christian religion was defamed and the Crown disgraced.Gradually efforts such as these sufficed to mitigate the sorrows of the Indians; but for many years their influence was scarcely perceived. The spirit of the conquerors was too high for submission to any limitation of prerogatives which they had gained through perils so great; their hearts were too fierce, their orthodoxy too strict to admit any concern for the sufferings of unbelievers. They were followed by swarms of adventurers—brave, greedy, lawless. Success—unlooked for and dazzling—attended the search for gold. Conquest followed conquest with a rapidity which left hopelessly in arrear the efforts of Spain to supply government for the enormous dependencies suddenly thrown upon her care. Every little native community was given over to the tender mercies of a man who regarded human suffering with unconcern; who was animated by a consuming hunger for gold, and who knew that Indian labour would procure for him the gold which he sought. In course of years, the persistent efforts of the Government and the Church bridled the measureless and merciless rapacity of the Spanish colonists. But this restraint was not established till ruin which could never be retrieved had fallen on the Indians; till millions had perished, and the spirit of the survivors was utterly broken.
When the English began to colonize the northern continent of America, their infant settlements enjoyed at the hands of the mother country a beneficent neglect.[32]The early colonists came out in little groups—obscure men fleeing from oppression, or seeking in a new world an enlargement of the meagre fortune which they had been able to find at home. They gained their scanty livelihood by cultivating the soil. The native population lived mainly by the chase, and possessed nothing of whichthey could be plundered. The insignificance of these communities sufficed to avert from them the notice of the monarchs whose dominions they had quitted. And thus they escaped the calamity of institutions imposed upon them by ignorance and selfishness; they secured the inestimable advantage of institutions which grew out of their own requirements and were moulded according to their own character and habits.
In the unhappy experience of Spanish America all these conditions were reversed. There were countries in which the precious metals abounded, and many of whose products could be procured without labour and converted readily into money. There was a vast native population in whose hands much gold and silver had accumulated, and from whom, therefore, a rich spoil could be easily wrung. There were powerful monarchies, the romantic circumstances of whose conquest drew the attention of the civilized world. Spain, marvelling much at her own good fortune, hastened to bind these magnificent possessions closely and inseparably to herself.
The territories which England gained in America were regarded as the property of the English nation, for whose advantage they were administered. Spanish America was the property of the Spanish Crown. The gift of the Pope was a gift, not to the Spanish nation, but to Ferdinand and Isabella and their successors. The Government of England never attempted to make gain of her colonies; on the contrary, large sums were lavished on these possessions, and the Government sought no advantage but the gain which colonial trade yielded to the nation. The Sovereigns of Spain sought direct and immediate profit from their colonies. The lands and all the people who inhabited them were their own; theirs necessarily were the products of these lands. No Spaniard might set foot on American soil without a license from the House of Trade. No foreigner was suffered to go, on any terms whatever. Even Spanish subjects of Jewish or Moorish blood were excluded.The Sovereigns claimed as their own two-thirds[33]of all the gold and silver which were obtained, and one-tenth of all other commodities. They established an absolute monopoly in pearls and dye-woods. They levied heavy duties on all articles which were imported into the colonies. They levied a tax onpulque—the intoxicant from which the Indians drew a feeble solace for their miseries. They sold for a good price a Papal Bull, which conveyed the right to eat meat on days when ecclesiastical law restricted the faithful to meaner fare. Acting rigorously according to financial methods such as these, the Spanish Crown drew from the colonies a revenue which largely exceeded the expenses of the colonial administration.
The results of the first two voyages of Columbus disappointed public expectation, and the interest which his discovery had awakened almost ceased. But when the admiral, after his third voyage, sent home pearls and gold and glowing accounts of the treasures which he had at last found, boundless possibilities of sudden wealth presented themselves, and the adventurous youth of Spain hastened to embrace the unprecedented opportunity. The old and rich fitted out ships and loaded them with the inexpensive trifles which savages love; the young and poor sought, under any conditions, the boon of conveyance to the golden world where wealth could be gained without labour: the King granted licenses to such adventurers, and without sharing in their risks and outlays secured to himself a large portion of their profits. So great was the emigration, that in a few years Spain could with difficulty obtain men to supply the waste of her European wars, and found herself in possession of enormous territories and a numerous population for which methods of government and of trade had to be provided.
The government which was established had the simplicity of a pure despotism.1511 A.D.The King established a Council which exercisedabsolute authority over the new possessions, and continued in its functions so long as South America accepted government from Spain. This body framed all the laws and regulations according to which the affairs of the colonies were guided; nominated to all offices; controlled the proceedings of all officials. Two Viceroys[34]were appointed, who maintained regal state, and wielded the supreme authority with which the King invested them.
The early colonial policy of all European nations was based on the idea that foreign settlements existed, not for their own benefit, but for the benefit of the nation to which they belonged. Under this belief, colonists were fettered with numerous restrictions which hindered their own prosperity in order to promote that of the mother country. Spain carried this mistaken and injurious policy to an extreme of which there is nowhere else any example. The colonies were jealously limited in regard to their dealings with one another, and were absolutely forbidden to have commercial intercourse with foreign nations. All the surplus products of their soil and of their mines must be sent to Spain; their clothing, their furniture, their arms, their ornaments must be supplied wholly by Spain. No ship of their own might share in the gains of this lucrative traffic, which was strictly reserved for the ships of Spain. Ship-building was discouraged, lest the colonists should aspire to the possession of a fleet. If a foreign vessel presumed to enter a colonial port, the disloyal colonist who traded with her incurred the penalties of death and confiscation of goods. The colonists were not suffered to cultivate any product which it suited the mother country to supply. The olive and the vine flourished in Peru; Puerto Rico yielded pepper; in Chili there was abundance of hemp and flax. All these were suppressed that the Spanish growers might escape competition. That the tradeof the colonies might be more carefully guarded and its revenues more completely gathered in, it was confined to one Spanish port. No ship trading with the colonies might enter or depart elsewhere than at Seville, and afterwards at Cadiz. For two centuries the interests of the colonies and of Spain herself languished under this senseless tyranny.
Those cities which were endowed with a monopoly of colonial trade enjoyed an exceptional prosperity. Seville attracted to herself a large mercantile community and a flourishing manufacture of such articles as the colonists required. She became populous and rich, and her merchants affected a princely splendour. And well they might. The internal communications of Spain were, as they always have been, extremely defective, and the gains of the new traffic were necessarily reaped in an eminent degree by the districts which lay around the shipping port.
Once in the year, for nearly two hundred years, there sailed from the harbour of Seville or of Cadiz the fleets which maintained the commercial relations of Spain with her American dependencies. One was destined for the southern colonies, the other for Mexico and the north. They were guarded by a great force of war-ships. Every detail as to cargo and time of sailing was regulated by Government authority; no space was left in this sadly over-governed country for free individual action. In no year did the tonnage of the merchant-ships exceed twenty-seven thousand tons. The traffic was thus inconsiderable in amount; but it was of high importance in respect of the enormous profits which the merchants were enabled by their monopoly to exact. The southern branch of the expedition steered for Carthagena, and thence to Puerto Bello; the ships destined for the north sought Vera Cruz. To the points at which they were expected to call there converged, by mountain-track and by river, innumerable mules and boats laden with the products of the country. A fair was opened, and for a period of forty days an energetic exchange of commodities went on. When all was concluded,the colonial purchasers carried into the interior the European articles which they had acquired. The gold and silver and pearls, and whatever else the colonies supplied, having been embarked, the ships met at the Havana and took their homeward voyage, under the jealous watch of the armed vessels which escorted them hither.
The treasure-ships of Spain carried vast amounts of gold and silver; and when Spain was involved in war, they were eagerly sought after by her enemies. Many a bloody sea-fight has been fought around these precious vessels; and many a galleon whose freight was urgently required in impoverished Spain found in the Thames an unwelcome termination to her voyage.1804 A.D.On one occasion England, in her haste not waiting even to declare war, possessed herself of three ships containing gold and silver to the value of two million sterling, the property of a nation with which she was still at peace.
But her hostile neighbours were not the only foes who lay in wait to seize the remittances of Spain. During the seventeenth century, European adventurers—English, French, and Dutch—flocked to the West Indies. At first they meditated nothing worse than smuggling; but they quickly gave preference to piracy, as an occupation more lucrative and more fully in accord with the spirit of adventure which animated them. They sailed in swift ships, strongly manned and armed; they recreated themselves by hunting wild cattle, whose flesh they smoked over theirboucanesor wood-fires—drawing from this practice the name of Buccaneer, under which they made themselves so terrible. They lurked in thousands among the intricacies of the West India islands, ready to spring upon Spanish ships; they landed occasionally to besiege a fortified or to plunder and burn a defenceless Spanish town. In time, the European Governments, which once encouraged, now sought to suppress them. This proved a task of so much difficulty that it is scarcely sixty years since the last of the dreaded West India pirates was hanged.
Spain sought to preserve the dependence of her American possessions by the studied promotion of disunion among her subjects. The Spaniard who went out from the mother country was taught to stand apart from the Spaniard who had been born in the colonies. To the former nearly all official positions were assigned. The dependencies were governed by Old Spaniards; all lucrative offices in the Church were occupied by the same class. They looked with some measure of contempt upon Spaniards who were not born in Spain; and they were requited with the jealousy and dislike of their injured brethren. There were laws carefully framed to hold the negro and the Indian races apart from each other. The unwise Sovereigns of Spain regarded with approval the deep alienations which their policy created, and rejoiced to have rendered impossible any extensive combination against their authority.
The supreme desire which animated Spain in all her dealings with her colonies was the acquisition of gold and silver, and there fell on her in a short time the curse of granted prayers. The foundations of her colonial history were laid in a destruction of innocent human life wholly without parallel; influences originating with the colonies hastened the decline of her power and the debasement of her people. But gold and silver were gained in amounts of which the world had never dreamed before. The mines of Hispaniola were speedily exhausted and abandoned. But soon after the conquest the vast mineral wealth of Peru was disclosed. An Indian hurrying up a mountain in pursuit of a strayed llama, caught hold of a bush to save himself from falling. The bush yielded to his grasp, and he found attached to its roots a mass of silver. All around, the mountains were rich in silver. The rumoured wealth of Potosi attracted multitudes of the adventurous and the poor, and the lonely mountain became quickly the home of a large population. A city which numbered ultimately one hundred and fifty thousand souls arose at an elevation of thirteen thousand feet abovesea-level: several thousand mines were opened by the eager crowds who hastened to the spot. A little later the yet more wonderful opulence of Mexico was discovered. During the whole period of Spanish dominion over the New World the production of the precious metals, especially of silver, continued to increase, until at length it reached the large annual aggregate of ten million sterling. Two centuries and a half passed in the interval between the discovery of the Western mines and the overthrow of Spanish authority. During that period there was drawn from the mines of the New World a value of fifteen hundred or two thousand million sterling.
When this flood of wealth began to pour in upon the country, Spain stood at the highest pitch of her strength. The divisions which for many centuries had enfeebled her were now removed, and Spain was united under one strong monarchy. Her people, trained for many generations in perpetual war with their Moorish invaders, were robust, patient, enduring, regardless of danger. Their industrial condition was scarcely inferior to that of any country in Europe. Barcelona produced manufactures of steel and glass which rivalled those of Venice. The looms of Toledo, occupied with silk and woollen fabrics, gave employment to ten thousand workmen; Granada and Valencia sent forth silks and velvets; Segovia manufactured arms and fine cloths; around Seville, while she was still the only port of shipment for the New World, there were sixteen thousand looms. So active was the demand which Spanish manufacturers enjoyed, that at one time the orders held by them could not have been executed under a period of six years. Spain had a thousand merchant ships—certainly the largest mercantile marine in Europe. Her soil was carefully cultivated, and many districts which are now arid and barren wastes yielded then luxuriant harvests.
But Spain proved herself unworthy of the unparalleled opportunities which had been granted to her. Her Kings turned the national attention to military glory, and consumed the livesand the substance of the people in aggressive wars upon neighbouring States. Her Church suppressed freedom of thought, and thus, step by step, weakened and debased the national intellect.1492 A.D.The Jews were expelled from Spain, and the country never recovered from the wound which the loss of her most industrious citizens inflicted. The easily-gained treasure of the New World fired the minds of the people with a restless ambition, which did not harmonize with patient industry. The waste of life in war, and the eager rush to the marvellous gold-fields of America, left Spain insufficiently supplied with population to maintain the industrial position which she had reached. Her manufactures began to decay, until early in the seventeenth century the sixteen thousand looms of Seville had sunk to four hundred. Agriculture shared the fall of the sister industries; and ere long Spain was able with difficulty to support her own diminished population. Her navy, once the terror of Europe, was ruined. Her merchant ships became the prey of enemies whose strength had grown as hers had decayed. The traders of England and Holland, setting at defiance the laws which she was no longer able to enforce, supplied her colonies with manufactures which she in her decline was no longer able to produce.
The North American possessions of England became an inestimable blessing to England and to the human family, because they were the slow gains of patient industry. Their ownership was secured not by the sword, but by the plough. Nothing was done for them by fortune; the history of their growth is a record of labour, undismayed, unwearied, incessant. Every new settler, every acre redeemed from the wilderness, contributed to the vast aggregate of wealth and power which has been built up slowly, but upon foundations which are indestructible.
The success of Spain was the demoralizing success of the fortunate gambler. Within the lifetime of a single generationten or twelve million of Spaniards came into possession of advantages such as had never before been bestowed upon any people. A vast region, ten times larger than their own country, glowing with the opulence of tropical vegetation, fell easily into their hands. Products of field and of forest which were eagerly desired in Europe were at their call in boundless quantity. A constant and lucrative market was opened for their own productions. Millions of submissive labourers spared them the necessity of personal effort. All that nations strive for as their chief good—territorial greatness, power, wealth, ample scope for commercial enterprise—became suddenly the coveted possession of Spain. But these splendours served only to illustrate her incapacity, to hasten her ruin, to shed a light by which the world could watch her swift descent to the nether gloom of idleness, depopulation, insolvency, contempt.