Then began one of the most deplorable passages in all the early history of Cuba, in which good intentions were frustrated, benevolent purposes defeated, and the remnants of a race undeservedly doomed to destruction. Manuel de Rojas should be credited with having been of all men of this time one of the most honest and able, and most sincere in his desire to do justice to the native Indians. He saw through the web of trickery and malign conditions in which they had been enmeshed by those who were predetermined that the experiment of emancipation should fail, and he unsparingly denounced it all. The Indians who had been "selected" for the experiment had in fact not been selected at all, but had been taken at haphazard, without regard to their fitness; if indeed they had not been taken largely because of their unfitness. They had, moreover, been subjected to the instruction and direction of those who seemed more interested in extorting profit from them than in assisting them to independence. Rojas demanded that these abuses should be corrected, and that the natives should have at least a fair, unhampered chance to show themselves fit for freedom and Cuban citizenship. As a result of his own painstaking investigation, he reported to the King that the tales of Indian insurrections, actual or threatened, which his predecessor had circulated, were chiefly false; obviously invented for the purpose of discrediting the Indians. It was the old story: "Give a dog a bad name, and hang him." The Indians were to be slandered, and represented as incorrigible criminals, and then doomed to slavery. Moreover, in the few cases in which revolts or attempted revolts had occurred, the blame should rest upon the Spaniards more than upon the Indians, for the former had goaded the latter to desperation by inhuman cruelties, in resisting which the Indians were manifesting not savagery but manhood. In support of this view of the situation, Rojas was able to cite many specific and perfectly well authenticated instances of cruelty and injustice. To correct these evils he recommended that whenever it was proved that a mine-owner, farmer or other employer of native labor, had deliberately treated his Indians cruelly or unjustly, the men should be taken away from him and either set at liberty or be assigned to a more humane employer. The danger of thus being deprived of their workmen would, he plausibly believed, restrain employers from brutality. He also insisted that the professional "slave catchers," who made a profitable business of running down and returning to their employers fugitive Indians, and who notoriously treated such captives with gross cruelty, should be forbidden longer to ply their nefarious trade.