While such was their conduct to each other, we may very well imagine what it was to the unhappy natives. These fine countries, indeed, were given up to universal plunder and violence. The people were everywhere pursued for their wealth, their dwellings ransacked without mercy, and themselves seized on as slaves. As in the West Indian Islands and in Mexico, they were driven to the mines, and tasked without regard to their strength,—and like them, they perished with a rapidity that alarmed even the Court of Spain, and induced them to send out officers to inquire, and to stop this waste of human life. Las Casas again filled Spain with his loud remonstrances, but with no better success. When their viceroys, visitors, and superintendents arrived, and published their ordinances, requiring the Indians to be treated as free subjects, violent outcries and furious remonstrances, similar to what England has in modern times received from the West Indies when she has wished to lighten the chains of the negro, were the immediate result. The oppressors cried out that they should all be ruined,—that they were “robbed of their just rights,” and there was no prospect but of general insurrection, unless they might continue to devour the blood and sinews of the unfortunate Indians. One man, the President Gasca, a simple ecclesiastic, exhibited a union of talents and integrity most remarkable and illustrious amid such general corruption; he went out poor and he returned so, from a country where the temptations to wink at evil were boundless; and he effected a great amount of good in the reduction of civil disorder; but the protection of the Indians was beyond even his power and sagacity, and he left them to their fate. CHAPTER X. THE SPANIARDS IN PARAGUAY.