Now all these peculiarities, although in the most unenlightened states of Greece they would have entitled their possessors to immortal honor, as having reduced to practice those rigid and abstemious maxims, the mere talking about which acquired certain old Greeks the reputation of sages and philosophers,—yet, were they clearly proved in the present instance to betoken a most abject and brutified nature, totally beneath the human character. But the benevolent fathers, who had undertaken to turn these unhappy savages into dumb beasts, by dint of argument, advanced still stronger proofs; for, as certain divines of the sixteenth century, and among the rest Lullus, affirm,—the Americans go naked, and have no beards! “They have nothing,” says Lullus, “of the reasonable animal, except the mask.” And even that mask was allowed to avail them but little, for it was soon found that they were of a hideous copper complexion; and being of a copper complexion, it was all the same as if they were negroes: and negroes are black,—“and black,” said the pious fathers, devoutly crossing themselves, “is the color of the Devil!” Therefore, so far from being able to own property, they had no right even to personal freedom; for liberty is too radiant a deity to inhabit such gloomy temples. All which circumstances plainly convinced the righteous followers of Cortes and Pizarro, that these miscreants had no title to the soil that they infested,—that they were a perverse, illiterate, dumb, beardless, black-seed,—mere wild beasts of the forests, and like them should either be subdued or exterminated. From the foregoing arguments, therefore, and a variety of others equally conclusive, which I forbear to enumerate, it is clearly evident that this fair quarter of the globe, when first visited by Europeans, was a howling wilderness, inhabited by nothing but wild beasts; and that the transatlantic visitors acquired an incontrovertible property therein by the _right of discovery_. This right being fully established, we now come to the next, which is the right acquired by _cultivation_. “The cultivation of the soil,” we are told, “is an obligation imposed by nature on mankind. The whole world is appointed for the nourishment of its inhabitants; but it would be incapable of doing it, was it uncultivated. Every nation is then obliged by the law of nature to cultivate the ground that has fallen to its share. Those people, like the ancient Germans and modern Tartars, who, having fertile countries, disdain to cultivate the earth, and choose to live by rapine, are wanting to themselves, and _deserve to be exterminated as savage and pernicious beasts_.”[20]