Before such a charge as that of excessive cruelty can be made good against a people, there are several things to be considered. And first the motive. The surgeon who amputates a limb to save a life is not called cruel. Now the Spaniards were the spiritual surgeons of their day. Nine tenths of all their cruelties were committed under the conviction that what they did was in the line of duty, and that to refrain from so doing would have been no kindness. Though with the experience of the past and by the clearer light of the nineteenth century we conclude that these convictions were false, and though we contemplate them with horror and condemn the acts which resulted from them as barbarous, yet it is almost superfluous to say that with their teachings and surroundings we should have been the same. The inherent qualities of human nature seem to be changed but little if at all by the cultivation and development of mind. Secondly, the quality of cruelty is not pronounced, but relative. There are cruelties of the heart, of the sensibilities, no less cruel than bodily tortures. The age of savagism is always cruel. Cruelty springs from ignorance rather than from instinct. Childlike and thoughtless things, things tender by instinct, are cruel from disingenuous perversity. A clouded, unreasoning, unreasonable mind, even when hiding beneath it a tender heart, begets cruelty; while a sterner disposition, if accompanied by a clear, truth-loving intellect, delights in no injustice—and cruelty is always unjust. This is why, if it be true as has been charged, that notwithstanding boys are more cruel than girls, women are more cruel than men. Children, women, and savages are cruel from thoughtlessness; though the cruel boy may be very tender of his puppy, the cruel woman of her child, the cruel savage of his horse. Even the moralities and intellectual refinements of that day were not free from what would seem to us studied and unnecessary cruelty. I will cite a few instances of European cruelty, not confined to Spaniards, which will show not only that Spain was not more cruel than other nations, but that the savages of America were not more cruel than the Europeans of their day. Both tortured to the uttermost where they hated, even as men do now; the chief difference was, the Europeans, being the stronger, could torture the harder. Civilization changes, not the quantity of cruelty, but the quality only. [Sidenote: THE BARBARISMS OF EUROPE.]