THE NEED OF LABORERS. The hardships and dangers of the voyage and the reports of suffering from famine and disease kept most people from going to the New World. Emigration was slow, amounting to about a thousand a year. There were always fewer capable white laborers than the landowners in the colonies needed for their work, for there was much to do in clearing the land and preparing it for use. The landowners were usually well-to-do Spaniards who did not like to work in the fields themselves. A great many of the laborers who migrated to America served in the army or went to the gold and silver mines of Mexico and Peru. The craze for gold constantly robbed the older colonies of their farm laborers. The landowners in the islands of the West Indies, during the early history of the colonies, made slaves of the Indians and compelled them to take the place of the laborers they needed and could not obtain. INDIAN SLAVERY. The people of Europe thought that the whole world belonged to the followers of Christ. Non-Christians, whether Indian or negro, had the choice of accepting Christianity or of being made slaves. The choice of Christianity did not always save them from the fate of slavery. In this the Spaniards were no more cruel than their neighbors the English or the French. The Spanish planters from the beginning forced the Indians to work their farms. The gold seekers made them work in their mines. The labor in every case was hard, and specially hard for the Indian unused to work. The overseers were brutal when the slaves did not do the tasks set for them. Hard usage and the unhealthful quarters rapidly broke down the natives. The white men also brought into the island diseases which they, with their greater experience, could resist, but from which, one writer says, the Indians died like sheep with a distemper. [Illustration: A SPANISH GALLEON Ships like this carried the Spanish emigrants to America] SLAVERY DESTROYS THE WEST INDIANS. When the number of the Indians in Espanola and Cuba had decreased so much that there were not enough left to meet the needs of the planters, slave-hunters searched the neighboring islands for others. Finally, when the Indians were nearly gone, and the planters began to look to the mainland for their slaves, the king of Spain forbade making slaves of the Indians. Unfortunately he did not forbid them to capture negroes in Africa for the same purpose, and the change merely meant that negroes took the place of Indians as slaves. The story of the change is in great part the story of the life of Bartholomew de Las Casas.