There was something phenomenal and monstrous, something so aimless, reckless, wanton, unprovoked, utterly ruinous even for themselves, in that course of riot and atrocity pursued by the Spaniards, which leads us—while palliation and excuse are out of the question—to seek some physical or moral explanation of it. This has generally been found in referring to the training of Spanish nature in inhumanity, cruelty, contempt of human life, and obduracy of feeling, through many centuries of ruthless warfare. It was in the very year of the discovery of America that the Spaniards, in the conquest of Granada, had finished their eight centuries of continuous war for wresting their proud country from the invading Moors. This war had made every Spaniard a fighter, and every infidel an enemy exempted from all tolerance and mercy. Treachery, defiance of pledges and treaties, brutalities, and all wild and reckless stratagems, had educated the champions of the Cross and faith in what were to them but the accomplishments of the soldier and the fidelity of the believer. Even in the immunities covenanted to the subject-Moors, of tolerance in their old home and creed, the ingenuities of their implacable foes found the means of new devices for oppression and outrage. The Holy Office of the Inquisition, with all its cavernous secrets and fiendish processes, dates also from the same period, and gave its fearful consecration to all the most direful passions. With that training in inhumanity and cruelty which the Spanish adventurers brought to these shores, we must take into view that towering, overmastering rapacity and greed which were to glut themselves upon the spoils of mines, precious stones, and pearls. The rich soil, with the lightest tillage, would have yielded its splendid crops for man and beast. Flocks would have multiplied and found their own sustenance for the whole year without any storage in garner, barn, or granary. A rewarding commerce would have enriched merchants on either side of well-traversed ocean pathways. But not the slightest thought or recognition was given during the first half-century of the invasion to any such enterprise as is suggested by the terms colonization, the occupancy of soil for husbandry and domestication. Spanish pride, indolence, thriftlessness regarded every form of manual labor as a demeaning humiliation. There was no peasantry among the new-comers. The humblest of them in birth, rank, and means was a gentleman; his hands could not hold a spade or a rake, or guide the plough. The horse and the hound were the only beasts on his inventory of values. Sudden and vast enrichment by the treasures of gold wrung from the natives, first in their fragmentary ornaments, and then by compulsory toil from the mines which would yield it in heaps, were the lure and passion of the invaders. The natives, before they could reach any conception of the Divine Being of the Catholic