wholly unjust, impolitic, and futile to wage war against them as simply barbarians. The Moors of Africa had been Christians in the time of Augustine, and had been perverted, and so might rightfully be reclaimed.” The Royal Council, after listening to the dispute and the summary of its points, asked Las Casas to draw up a paper on the question whether they might lawfully enslave the Indians, or were bound to set free all who were reduced to bondage. He replied that the law of God does not justify war against any people for the sake of making them Christians; so the whole course of treatment of the Indians had been wrong from the start. The Indians were harmless; they had never had the knowledge or the proffer of Christianity: so they had never fallen away, like the Moors of Africa, Constantinople, and Jerusalem. No sovereign prince had authorized the Spaniards to make war. The Spaniards cannot pretend that their reason for making war was because of the cruelty of the Indians to each other. The slaughter of them was indiscriminate and universal. They were enslaved and branded with the King’s arms. The monarch never authorized these execrable artifices and shocking atrocities, a long catalogue of which is specified. The Clerigo then warms into an earnest dissertation on natural and Christian equity. He quotes some beautiful sentences from the will of Isabella, enjoining her own humanity on her husband and daughter. He makes a strong point of the fact that Isabella first, and then a council of divines and lawyers at Burgos, and Charles himself in 1523, had declared that all the inhabitants of the New World had been born free. Only Las Casas’ earnestness, his pure and persistent purpose, relieve of weariness his reiteration of the same truths and appeals to the King. He insists over and over again that the delegating of any portion of the King’s own personal authority to any Spaniard resident in the New World, or even to the Council of the Indies, opens the door to every form and degree of abuse, and that he must strictly reserve all jurisdiction and control to himself. In a second treatise, which Las Casas addressed to Charles V., he states at length the practical measures needful for arresting the wrongs and disasters consequent upon the enslaving of the Indians. Of the twenty methods specified, the most important is that the King should not part with the least portion of his sovereign prerogative. He meets the objection artfully raised by Sepulveda, that if the King thus retains all authority to himself he may lose the vast domain to his crown, and that the Spaniards will be forced to return to Europe and give up the work of Gospel conversion.