The English colonists found different conditions waiting them when they landed on the northern coasts of America, where the Indian tribes were neither gentle nor submissive. Two absolutely alien and hostile races faced one another, of which the higher professed small concern for the amelioration of the lower, while amalgamation was excluded by the mutual pride of race and the instinctive enmity that divided them. There was no enslaving of Indians, and the torturing was done entirely by the savages, but, while the English method spared the individual Indian the suffering his defenceless brother in the south had to endure, the aboriginal races have everywhere receded before the relentless advance of civilisation. The battle between the civilised and savage peoples has been uncompromising; the stronger of the Indian nations have gone down, fighting, while the remnants of such tribes as survive remain herded on the ever-encroaching frontiers of a civilisation in which a tolerable place has been but tardily provided for them. We cannot escape the conclusion that our treatment of the races we have displaced and exterminated has been as systematically and remorselessly destructive as was the spasmodic and ofttimes sportive cruelty operated by the Spaniards. The Spanish national conscience recognised the obligation of civilising and Christianising the Indians, a task which Spaniards finally accomplished. The Spanish sovereigns were honestly desirous of protecting their new subjects, and the injustice inflicted on the latter was done in defiance of the laws they enacted, as well as of public opinion in Spain, which condemned it as severely as could the most advanced humanitarian sentiment of our own times. Las Casas voiced this condemnation and organised a masterly campaign of education on the subject of the proper method of dealing with the Indians. He suffered and endured for their sakes, while the men whose selfish and inhuman undertakings he thwarted poured the vilest abuse and calumny upon him. Nature had mercifully endowed him with no sensitiveness save for the sufferings of the oppressed, and he was as much a born fighter as the fiercest conqueror who ever landed in Spanish America. He waged a moral battle, animated by only the noblest motives, and in his damning arraignment of his countrymen, he eschewed personalities and, with a charity as rare as it was becoming to his sacerdotal character, he occupied himself exclusively with the principles at stake, leaving the punishment of the criminals to the final justice of God.