The interests of civilization and of a true humanity were, therefore, united with the humane desires of Las Casas and his friends in respect to the natives, and negroes soon became the sole reliance of the planters and others to whom lands had been assigned by the Spanish princes. Modern writers—Helps, Prescott, and others—laboring under the world-wide misconceptions of our times in regard to negroes, have expressed astonishment at the (to them) strange inconsistency of Las Casas, who, laboring so earnestly in behalf of the Indians, quite unconsciously aided in substituting the negro, and thus, as they suppose, laid the foundation or led the way to the enslavement of one race, while working for the freedom of another. But neither Las Casas, nor any one else, had any notion of freedom or slavery in connection with these negroes. Such a thing as a free negro was doubtless unknown in Spain or anywhere else, or, if known, it was simply because he had lost or strayed from his master. History does not, it is true, cast much light on the subject, but it is certain that neither Las Casas nor any of his cotemporaries had any conception of negro freedom, or associated with that race any other condition or social status than that which modern writers have universally designated as negro slavery. Nor was he laboring for the freedom of the Indians, as that term is now understood. Many, perhaps most of those who defended the natives from the oppressions of the Spaniards, were prompted solely by religious zeal. These poor “heathens,” they held, were entitled, not to freedom, to political or social rights of any kind, but to the rights of religion, to participate in the Holy Sacraments, to enjoy the privileges which the Church promised to all who would accept them, and as the ferocity of the Spaniards constantly interfered with this, hunted them down and slaughtered them without mercy, or rapidly destroyed them by hard labor and the excessive burthens heaped upon them when they no longer resisted their invaders, the priests generally, and many others, sought to defend them. Las Casas, who seems to have been a generous and noble-hearted man, devoted himself for many years, indeed a whole life-time, to the cause of the natives, but at no time or in any way was he laboring for their freedom or to secure to them social or political rights of any kind. Other priests labored to secure their spiritual welfare, or what they believed to be this, while Las Casas, though a profoundly religious man, sought their material preservation, and to save them from that direful fate of total extinction which even then was threatened, and which finally has been so complete, that at this moment there is not one single descendant of these people left to tell the tale of their destruction. The popular notion, therefore, that Las Casas was the author or originator of the “slave trade,” and of American (negro) “slavery,” in order to “free” the native race, is altogether groundless.