creed, soon came to the understanding of the real object of their worship: as a cacique plainly set forth to a group of his trembling subjects, when, holding up a piece of gold, he said, “This is the Spaniards’ god.” A sordid passion, with its overmastery of all the sentiments of humanity, would inflame the nerves and intensify all the brutal propensities which are but masked in men of a low range of development even under the restraints of social and civil life. We must allow for the utter recklessness and frenzy of their full indulgence under the fervors of hot climes, in the loosening of all domestic and neighborly obligations, in the homelessness of exile and the mad freedom of adventure. Under the fretting discomforts and restraints of the ocean-passage hither, the imagination of these rapacious treasure-seekers fed itself on visions of wild license of arbitrary power over simple victims, and of heaps of treasure to be soon carried back to Spain to make a long revel in self-indulgence for the rest of life. “Cruelties” was the comprehensive term under which Las Casas gathered all the enormities and barbarities, of which he was a witness for half a century, as perpetrated on the successive scenes invaded by his countrymen on the islands and the main of the New World. He had seen thousands of the natives crowded together, naked and helpless, for slaughter, like sheep in a park or meadow. He had seen them wasted at the extremities by torturing fires, till, after hours of agony, they turned their dying gaze, rather in amazed dread than in rage, upon their tormentors. Mutilations of hands, feet, ears, and noses surrounded him with ghastly spectacles of all the processes of death without disease. One may well leave all details to the imagination; and may do this all the more willingly that even the imagination will fail to fill and fashion the reality of the horror. * * * * * Previous to the successful ventures on the western ocean, the Portuguese had been resolutely pursuing the work of discovery by pushing their daring enterprise farther and farther down the coast of Africa, till they at last turned the Cape.[1013] The deportation of the natives and their sale as slaves at once became first an incidental reward, and then the leading aim of craving adventurers. It was but natural that the Spaniards should turn their success in other regions to the same account. Heathen lands and heathen people belonged by Papal donation to the soldiers of the Cross; they were the heritage of the Church. The plea of conversion answered equally for conquest and subjugation of the natives on their own soil, and for transporting them to the scenes and sharers of a pure and saving faith.