Had the ability of Las Casas to direct his undertaking and to govern men been equal to his genius in the sphere of morals and intellect, and to the eloquence of his advocacy, the realisation of his ideal of justice and charity might have been assured. Certainly he contended against overwhelming odds in Spain, the Bishop of Burgos, who controlled American affairs, was implacably hostile; in America the colonial authorities and the entire population barring the friars and a possible handful of his friends, were vigilantly opposed to him; deceived and betrayed by his Squire Berrio, he was disobeyed by De Soto and abandoned by his colonists, while all hope of establishing friendly relations with the Indians in the territory conceded to him was annihilated by the Spaniards at Cubagua, whose aggressions kept the whole country in a state of alarm. These untoward conditions, which no foresight on his part could have avoided, were alone sufficient to explain the failure of his enterprise. His plans seem, however, to have involved a contradiction of a fundamental law of human progress which decrees the destruction of rudimentary forms of civilisation when brought into contact with a higher one. Neither humane civil legislation nor the higher principles of Christian charity have thus far served to save the weaker races of mankind from absorption or extermination. The fiercer and stronger tribes of American Indians receded before the Anglo-Saxon invasion of their territories, leaving a trail of blood behind them, while the weaker nations of the islands and Southern Americas went down before the Spaniards, with hardly more than a plaintive cry for mercy. The price of civilisation is a high one, and as the peoples of Europe paid it, so were the aboriginal populations of America not exempted from the blood-tax. The obscure workings of the mysterious laws of race-survival were forced on and hastened by the cruelties against which Las Casas protested in vain, but the triumphal march of human progress has followed on. Cannibalism, idolatry, slavery, and other barbarisms have disappeared from the American continents; the Christian religion has replaced degrading superstitions, agriculture and commerce flourish, while literature and the arts adorn life in the several republics, whose meanest citizen enjoys a security of life and property unknown to the proudest of their ancestors under the rule of Montezuma or the Incas. Belief in the principles of equity and charity forbids us to doubt that these and even nobler results might have been achieved by the methods advocated by Las Casas, but history records no racial expansion along other roads than that opened by the sword. CHAPTER XIII. - PROFESSION OF LAS CASAS. THE CACIQUE ENRIQUE. JOURNEYS OF LAS CASAS. A PEACEFUL VICTORY