Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings | Page 6

than in the islands and other parts of the coast country.
The Bishop of Burgos and Lope Conchillos will be seen to be fair exponents of the bureaucratic type of opponents to the reforms Las Casas advocated. The Bishop in particular appears in an unsympathetic light throughout his long administration of American affairs. Of choleric temper, his manners were aggressive and authoritative, and he used his high position to advance his private interests. He was a disciplinarian, a bureaucrat averse to novelties and hostile to enthusiasms. He anticipated Talleyrand's maxim "S?rtout pas de zole," and to be nagged at by a meddlesome friar was intolerable to him. Such men were probably no more consciously inhuman than many otherwise irreproachable people of all times, who complacently pocket dividends from deadly industries, without a thought to the obscure producers of their wealth or to the conditions of moral and physical degradation amidst which their brief lives are spent.
The most formidable of all the adversaries of Las Casas was Gines de Sepulveda. A man of acute intellect, vast learning, and superlative eloquence, this practiced debater stood for theocracy and despotism, defending the papal and royal claims to jurisdiction over the New World. In striving to establish a dual tyranny over the souls and bodies of its inhabitants, he concerned himself not at all with the human aspect of the question nor did he even pretend to controvert the facts with which his opponent met him. He was exclusively engaged in upholding the abstract right of the Pope and the Spanish sovereigns to exercise spiritual and temporal jurisdiction over heathen, as well as Catholic peoples. To impugn this principle was, according to Sepulveda, to strike at the very foundations of Christendom; that a few thousands of pagans, more or less, suffered and perished, was of small importance, compared with the maintenance of this elemental principal. First conquer and then convert, was his maxim. His thesis constitutes the very negation of Christianity.
[Illustration: Juan Gines de Sep��lveda]
Juan Gines de Sep��lveda
From the engraving by J. Barcelon, after the drawing of J. Maca.
Las Casas repeatedly challenged his opponents to refute his allegations or to contradict his facts and, in a letter to Carranza de Miranda in 1556, he wrote:
"It is moreover deplorable that, after having denounced this destruction of peoples to our sovereigns and their councils a thousand times during forty years, nobody has yet dreamed of proving the contrary and, after having done so, of punishing me by the shame of a retraction. The royal archives are filled with records of trials, reports, denunciations, and a quantity of other proofs of the assassinations{~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~}There exists also positive evidence of the immense population of Hispaniola--greater than that of all Spain--and of the islands of Cuba, Jamaica, and more than forty other islands, where neither animals nor vegetation survive. These countries are larger than the space that separates us from Persia, and the terra-firma is twice as considerable{~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~}I defy any living man, if he be not a fool, to dare deny what I allege, and to prove the contrary."
His enemies were devoid of scruples, and unsparingly used every means to nullify his influence and destroy his credit. He was ridiculed as a madman--a monomaniac on the subject of Indians and their rights; his plainly stated facts were branded as exaggerations, though nobody accepted his challenge to contradict them. Such tactics alternated with others, for he was also described as a heretic, as disloyal and unpatriotic, seeking to impeach the validity of Spanish sovereignty in the Indies and to bring ruin on the national interests.
The missionary period of the life of Las Casas in America ended with his return to Spain in 1549 and the resignation of his episcopal see that followed in 1552. From that time may be dated the third and last period of his life, which was marked by his literary activity, for, though he never again visited America, his vigilance and energy in defending the interests of the Indians 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