The earliest work of Las Casas, 'A Very Short Account of the Ruin of the Indies,' written in 1542, first disclosed to Europe the cruelties practiced beyond the sea. It was frequently reprinted, and made a great impression. Other short treatises followed, equally powerful and effective. They were collected in 1552 and translated into several languages. His chief work however is a 'General History of the Indies,' from 1492 to 1520, begun by him in 1527, unfinished in 1561. He ordered that no portion should be printed until forty years after his death, but it remained in manuscript for three hundred years, being published at Madrid in 1875. It has been called the corner-stone of the history of the American continent. Las Casas possessed important documents, among them the papers of Columbus, now lost. In his long life, moreover, he knew many of the early discoverers and many statesmen, as Columbus, Cortes, Ximenes, Pizarro, Gattinora, and he was the contemporary of three sovereigns interested in the West Indies,--King Ferdinand the Catholic, the Emperor Charles V., and King Philip II. of Spain. Las Casas is sometimes taxed with having brought negro slavery into America. In his profound compassion for the Indians he maintained that the negroes were better fitted for slave labor than the more delicate natives. But the Portuguese had imported African slaves into the colonies long before Las Casas suggested it, while he in time renounced his error, and frankly confesses it in his history. He was a large-hearted, large-brained man, unprejudiced in an age of bigotry; of unwearied industry and remarkable powers of physical endurance that enabled him to live a life of many-sided activities, as priest and missionary, colonist, man of business, and man of letters. As a historian he was a keen observer of men and of nature, and chronicled with great exactness the social and physical conditions of the countries he traversed. His merits are summed up in the following words by John Fiske, in his 'Discovery of America':--