‘We took to kidnapping upon a grand scale. Raids were made on all the Assin villages within reach of the line of march, and the men, and sometimes the women, carried off and sent up the country under guard, with cases of provisions. Lieutenant Bolton, of the 1st West India Regiment, rendered immense service in this way. Having been for some time commandant of Accra, he knew the coast and many of the chiefs; and having a man-of-war placed at his disposal, he went up and down the coast, landing continually, having interviews with chiefs, and obtaining from them large numbers of men and women; or when this failed, landing at night with a party of soldiers, surrounding villages, and sweeping off the adult population, leaving only a few women to look after the children. In this way, in the course of a month, he obtained several thousands of carriers.’[217] And then a certain school of writers talks of the love and respect for the British Empire which these exhibitions of our might are calculated to win from the inferior races! The Ashantees are disgraced by the practice of human sacrifices, and the Zulus have many a barbarous usage; but no amount of righteous indignation on that account justifies such dealings with them as those above described. If it does, we can no longer condemn the proceedings of the Spaniards in the New World. For we have to remember that it was not only the Christianity of the Inquisition, or Spanish commerce that they wished to spread; not mere gold nor new lands that they coveted, but that they also strove for such humanitarian objects as the abolition of barbarous customs like the Mexican human sacrifices. ‘The Spaniards that saw these cruel sacrifices,’ wrote a contemporary, the Jesuit Acosta, ‘resolved with all their power to abolish so detestable and cursed a butchery of men.’ The Spaniards of the sixteenth century were in intention or expression every whit as humane as we English of the nineteenth. Yet their actions have been a reproach to their name ever since. Cortes subjected Guatamozin, king of Mexico, to torture. Pizarro had the Inca of Peru strangled at the stake. Alvarado invited a number of Mexicans to a festival, and made it an opportunity to massacre them. Sandoval had 60 caziques and 400 nobles burnt at one time, and compelled their relations and children to witness their punishment. The Pope Paul had very soon (1537) to issue a bull, to the effect that the Indians were really men and not brutes, as the Spaniards soon affected to regard them.