There is not a word in this passage which even refers to the _introduction_ of negro slavery and Herrera in another passage (tom. i., dec. i., lib. iv., cap. xii.) states that a royal ordinance given on September 3, 1500, to Don Nicholas de Ovando, the Governor of Hispaniola, permitted the importation of negro slaves. This was two years before Las Casas made his first voyage as a young man of twenty-eight to America, and in 1503, the same Ovando asked that no more negro slaves be sent to Hispaniola because they escaped and lived amongst the natives whom they corrupted. (32) The number of negroes continued, nevertheless, to increase and repeated mention of their presence in the colonies is found in different passages throughout the history of Herrera and in other early writers. Since the first half of the fifteenth century (about 1440) (33) the Portuguese had been engaged in bringing negroes from the west coast of Africa and selling them in Lisbon and Seville, so that during half a century before Las Casas appeared on the scene where he was destined to play so distinguished a part, Andalusia and the southern provinces of Spain were well provided with slaves and a flourishing trade was carried on. The condition of such slaves was not a particularly hard one and the children born in Spain of slave parents were Christians. Since this system was recognised by the laws of the kingdom, and indeed by those of all Christendom at that time, no additional injury would be done to the negroes by permitting Spaniards who might own them in Spain, to take them also to the colonies. Las Casas was a man of such humane temperament that oppression and injustice everywhere of whatever kind revolted him, but it can hardly be required, even of him, to be several centuries in advance of his times in denouncing a commonly accepted usage which presented, as far as we know, few crying abuses. Toleration of an established order, even though an essentially evil one, is a very different thing from the extension of its worst features in regions where it is unknown and amongst people ill-fitted to support its burdens. A small group of men, chiefly Dominican monks, with Las Casas at their head, courageously championed the cause of freedom and humanity in a century and amongst a people hardened to oppression and cruelty; they braved popular fury, suffered calumny, detraction, and abuse; they faced kings, high ecclesiastics, and all the rich and great ones of their day, incessantly and courageously reprimanding their injustice and demanding reform. Since the memorable day when Fray Antonio de Montesinos proclaimed himself “vox clamantis in deserto” before the astonished and incensed colonists of Hispaniola, the chorus of rebuke had swelled until it made itself heard, sparing none amongst the offenders against equity and humanity. The development of the collective moral sense of a people is only slowly progressive, and the