scoured the seas and penetrated deserts to find victims of her mania for civilizing the world. But the Spaniards, as they were the first in the wrong, so they were beyond all approach of rivalry in the sum and method of their devastating and aimless havoc of frenzied and satanic passion against the least warlike and the most inoffensive of all our native tribes. If historic fidelity and candor in the use of our authorities would allow, it would cheer alike reader and writer if this direful record of slaughter and torture of a defenceless people had been at least, if not effectually, withstood by a steady protest, not merely from a single ecclesiastic, but by a considerable number of those who professed that the mainspring of the enterprise was the conversion of the natives. Instead of this relief, however, we do not need to pause long in our moralizing over the story to find that the most repulsive and shocking element in it is the persistent obtrusion, the even blasphemous reiteration, of a religious motive of the Conquest. The Jesuit Father, Charlevoix, who wrote a history of St. Domingo as well as of New France, gives in the latter work the following as one of the motives which prompted his historical labors: —
I have resolved to undertake this work in the desire to make
known the mercies of the Lord and the triumph of religion over
that small number of the elect, predestined before all ages, amid so
many savage tribes, which till the French entered their country
had lain buried in the thickest darkness of
infidelity.[1]
There was reason for this pious motive on the part of
the historian who had to relate the zeal, devotion, and to
themselves the satisfactory and rewarding success of his
brother missionaries in New France. But he has nothing
of the kind to tell us of Christian missionaries in St.
Domingo before the work of devastation and depopulation
had been completed. The natives were found by the
Spaniards in a peaceful, contented, and, so to speak, in-
- ↑ Charlevoix's New France, Shea's translation, vol. i. p. 103.
