Columbus formed a fresh settlement for his newcomers, and having defended it with mounds and ramparts of earth, went on a short voyage of discovery among the West Indian isles, and came back to find that the same scene of lust and rapine had been acted over again by his colony, and that the natives were all in arms for their destruction. It is curious to read the relation of the conduct of Columbus on this discovery, as given by Robertson, a _Christian_ and _Protestant_ historian. He tells us, on the authority of Herrera, and of the son of Columbus himself, that the Spaniards had outraged every human and sacred feeling of these their kind and hospitable entertainers. That in the voracity of their appetites, enormous as compared with the simple temperance of the natives, they had devoured up the maize and cassado-root, the chief sustenance of these poor people; that their rapacity threatened a famine; that the natives saw them building forts and locating themselves as permanent settlers where they had apparently come merely as guests; and that from their lawless violence as well as their voracity, they must soon suffer destruction in one shape or another from their oppressors. Self preservation prompted them to take arms for the expulsion of such formidable foes. “_It was now_,” adds Robertson, “_necessary to have recourse to arms_; the employing of which against the Indians, Columbus had hitherto avoided with the greatest solicitude.” Why necessary? Necessary for what? is the inquiry which must spring indignantly in every rightly-constituted mind. Because the Spaniards had been received with unexampled kindness, and returned it with the blackest ingratitude; because they had by their debauched and horrible outrages roused the people into defiance, those innocent and abused people must be massacred? That is a logic which might do for men who had been educated in the law of anti-Christ instead of Christ, and who went out with the Pope’s bull as a title to seize on the property of other people, wherever the abused and degraded cross had not been erected; but it could never have been so coolly echoed by a _Protestant_ historian, if it had not been for the spurious morality with which the Papal hierarchy had corrupted the world, till it became as established as gospel truth. Hear Robertson’s relation of the manner in which Columbus repaid the _Christian_ reception of these poor islanders.