Nor is there often any compensation for such results in the improved condition of the tribes whom it is sought to civilise after the method recommended by Sepulveda. The happiest fate of the populations he wished to see civilised by the sword was where they anticipated their extermination or slavery by a sort of voluntary suicide. In Cuba, we are told that ‘they put themselves to death, whole families doing so together, and villages inviting other villages to join them in a departure from a world that was no longer tolerable.’[223] And so it was in the other hemisphere; the Ladrone islanders, reduced by the sword and the diseases of the Spaniards, took measures intentionally to diminish their numbers and to check population, preferring voluntary extinction to the foul mercies of the Jesuits: till now a lepers’ hospital is the only building left on what was once one of the most populous of their islands. It must, however, be admitted in justice to the Spaniards, that the principles which governed their dealings with heathen races infected more or less the conduct of colonists of all nationalities. A real or more often a pretended zeal for the welfare of native tribes came among all Christian nations to co-exist with the doctrine, that in case of conflict with them the common restraints of war might be put in abeyance. What, for instance, can be worse than this, told of the early English settlers in America by one of themselves? ‘The Plymouth men came in the mean time to Weymouth, and there pretended to feast the savages of those parts, bringing with them forks and things for the purpose, which they set before the savages. They ate thereof without any suspicion of any mischief, who were taken upon a watchword given, and with their own knives hanging about their necks were by the Plymouth planters stabbed and slain.’[224]