[Sidenote: The crime of Spain in America.] For a second reason, also, I have dwelt on these details. The enormous crime of Spain in destroying this civilization has never yet been appreciated in Europe. After an attentive consideration of the facts of the case, I agree in the conclusion of Carli, that at the time of the conquest the moral man in Peru was superior to the European, and I will add, the intellectual man also. Was there in Spain, or even in all Europe, a political system carried out into the practical details of actual life, and expressed in great public works, as its outward visible and enduring sign, which could at all compare with that of Peru? Its only competitor was the Italian system, but that for long had been actively used to repress the intellectual advancement of man. [Sidenote: The Spaniard and the American.] In vain the Spaniards excuse their atrocities on the plea that a nation like the Mexican, which permitted cannibalism, should not be regarded as having emerged from the barbarous state, and that one which, like Peru, sacrificed human hecatombs at the funeral solemnities of great men, must have been savage. Let it be remembered that there is no civilized nation whose popular practices do not lag behind its intelligence; let it be remembered that in this respect Spain herself also was guilty. In America, human sacrifice was part of a religious solemnity, unstained by passion. The auto da fé of Europe was a dreadful cruelty; not an offering to heaven, but a gratification of spite, hatred, fear, vengeance--the most malignant passions of earth. [Sidenote: European and American human sacrifice.] There was no spectacle on the American continent at which a just man might so deeply blush for his race as that presented in Western Europe when the heretic from whom confession had been wrung by torture passed to his stake in a sleeveless garment, with flames of fire and effigies of an abominable import depicted upon it. Let it be remembered that by the Inquisition, from 1481 to 1808, 340,000 persons had been punished, and of these nearly 32,000 burnt. Let what was done in the south of France be remembered. Let it be also remembered that, considering the worthlessness of the body of man, and that, at the best, it is at last food for the worm--considering the infinite value of his immortal soul, for the redemption of which the agony and death of the Son of God were not too great a price to pay--indignities offered to the body are less wicked than indignities offered to the soul. It would be well for him who comes forward as an accuser of Mexico and Peru in their sin to dispose of the fact that at that period the entire authority of Europe was directed to the perversion, and even total repression of thought--to an enslaving of the mind, and making that noblest creation of Heaven a worthless machine. To taste of human flesh is less criminal in the eye of God than to stifle human thought.