Far from us the thought of making humanitarian theories with reference to a fight in the heart of the desert between two savage tribes, for it has too long been a principle among civilized nations that the Indians are ferocious brutes, possessed of nothing human but the face, and who should be destroyed, like all other noxious animals, by all possible means, even by those which are too repugnant to humanity for us to attempt for a single moment to defend. Still, much might be said in favour of these unhappy peoples, who have been oppressed ever since humanity decreed that a man of genius should find once more their country which had so long been lost. It would be easy for us to prove, if we thought proper, that these Peruvians and Mexicans, treated so haughtily and barbarously by the wretched adventurers who plundered them, enjoyed, at the period of the conquest, a civilization far more advanced than that of which their oppressors boasted, who had only one advantage over them in the knowledge of firearms, and who marched cased in steel from head to foot against men clothed in cotton and armed with inoffensive arrows. Placed beyond the pale of society by the unintelligent fanaticism and the inextinguishable thirst for gold which devoured the conquerors, the wretched Indians succumbed not only to the repeated assaults of their implacable conquerors, but were also destined to remain constantly beneath the oppression of a calumny which made them a stupid and ferocious race. The conquest of the New World was one of the most odious monstrosities of the middle ages, fertile though they were in atrocities. Millions of men, whose blood was poured out like water, were coldly killed; empires crumbled away for ever, entire populations disappeared from the globe, and left no trace of their passage but their whitened bones. America, which had been so populous, was almost suddenly converted into an immense desert, and the proscribed relics of this unfortunate race, driven back into barbarism, buried themselves in the most remote countries, where they resumed the nomadic life of the old days, continually carrying on war against the whites, and striving to requite them in detail all the evils they had received at their hands for centuries.