Here we must close our review of the Spaniards in the New World. Our narrative has been necessarily brief and rapid, for the history of their crimes extends over a vast continent, and through three centuries; and would, related at length, fill a hundred volumes. We have found them, however, everywhere the same—cruel, treacherous, and regardless of the feelings of humanity and the sense of justice. They have wreaked alike their vengeance on the natives of every country they have entered, and on those of their own race who dared to espouse the cause of the sufferers. This spirit continued to the last. In all their colonies, the natives, whether of Indian blood, or the Creoles descended of their own, were carefully excluded from the direction of their own affairs, and the emoluments of office. Spaniards from the mother country were sent over in rapacious swarms, to fatten on the vitals of these vast states, and return when they had sucked their fill. The retribution has followed; and Spain has not now left a single foot of all these countries which she has drenched in the blood, and filled with the groans of their native children. Mr. Ward, in his “Mexico in 1827,” says that in 1803, the number of Indians remaining in Mexico was two millions and a half; but that their history is everywhere a blank. Some have become habituated to civil life, and are excellent artizans, but the greater portion are totally neglected. That, during the Revolution, the sense of the injuries which the race had received from the Spaniards, and which seemed to have slumbered in their bosoms for three centuries, blazed up and shewed itself in the eager and burning enthusiasm with which they flocked to the revolutionary standard to throw off the yoke of their ancient oppressors. He adds, “Whatever may be the advantages which they may derive from the recent changes, and the nature of these time alone can determine, the fruits of the introduction of boasted civilization into the New World have been hitherto bitter indeed. Throughout America the Indian race has been sacrificed; nor can I discover that in New Spain any one step has been taken for their improvement. In the neighbourhood of the capital nothing can be more wretched than their appearance; and although under a republican form of government, they must enjoy, in theory at least, an equality of rights with every other class of citizens, they seemed practically, at the period of my first visit, to be under the orders of every one, whether officer, soldier, churchman, or civilian, who chose to honour them with a command.”—vol. ii. p. 215. CHAPTER XI. THE PORTUGUESE IN BRAZIL.