Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings — Edition Insights

Dominic were the first to defend the liberty of the Indian and his moral dignity as a reasonable being, endowed with free will and understanding. Associated in the popular conception with the foundation and extension of the Inquisition, the Dominicans may appear in a somewhat unfamiliar guise as torch-bearers of freedom in the vanguard of Spanish colonial expansion in America, but such was the fact. History has made but scant and infrequent mention of these first obscure heroes, who faced obloquy and even risked starvation in the midst of irate colonists, whose avarice and brutality they fearlessly rebuked in the name of religion and humanity: they sank, after lives of self-immolation, into nameless graves, sometimes falling victims to the blind violence of the very Indians whose cause they championed—protomartyrs of liberty in the new world.

The conditions under which Las Casas and his co-workers laboured were discouragingly adverse. The mailed conquerors and eager treasure-seekers who followed in the wake of Columbus were consumed by two ruthless passions—avarice and ambition.

Avarice and ambition alone, however, do not adequately explain their undertakings, and we find among them a fierce zeal for Christian propaganda strikingly disproportionate to their fitness to expound the doctrines or illustrate the virtues of the Christian religion. They seem to have frequently compounded for their sins of sensuality and their deeds of blood by championing the unity and purity of the faith—two things that were held to be of paramount importance, especially in Spain, where to be outside formal communion with the Church was to be either a Jew or a Mahometan, or in other words, an enemy of God.

Perverted as their conception of the true spirit of Christian propaganda may appear to us, it may not be doubted that many of these men were animated by honest missionary zeal and actually thought their singular methods would procure the conversion of the Indians. On the other hand, few of those who left Spain, animated by high motives, resisted the prevalent seductions of avarice and ambition, amidst conditions so singularly favourable to their gratification, and we find Las Casas denouncing, as ridiculous and hypocritical, the pretensions to solicitude for the spread of religion, under cover of which the colonists sought to obtain royal sanction for the systems of slavery and serfage they had inaugurated.

The essential differences observable in the Spanish and English colonies in America are traceable to the directly contrary systems of government prevailing at that time in the mother countries. All nations of Aryan stock possessed certain fundamental features of government, inherited from a common origin. Climatic and geographical conditions operated with divers other influences to produce race characteristics, from which the several nations of modern Europe were gradually evolved. Within each of these nations, the inherited political principles common to all of them were unequally and diversely developed. The forms of political liberty continued to survive in Spain, but, under Charles V., the government became, in practice, an absolute monarchy, the liberties of the Córtes and the Councils being gradually overshadowed by the ever-growing prerogatives of the Crown.

In England, on the contrary, the share of the people in the government was, in spite of opposition, of steady growth, only interrupted by occasional periods of suspension, while the power of the Crown declined. These conditions were repeated in the colonies of the two nations, with some variations of form that were due to local influences in each of them. The Spanish colonies relied entirely on the Crown and were, from the outset, over-provided with royal officials from the grade of viceroy to that of policeman, and even with clergy, all of whom were appointed by the king’s sole authority and were removable at his pleasure. These settlements generally owed their existence to private enterprise, having been founded by explorers and treasure-seekers, but in none of them did the colonists enjoy any political rights or liberties, other than what it pleased the sovereign to grant them.