BOOK IV. Angelo, a Raffaelle, and a Titian. The science. Ch. 2. of international politics had begun, for it was during this period that the policy of European nations became something like what it is now, so that we feel as if we were immediately related to the men of that day, though if we step back a few years in history, men then seem ancients to us. Taking it altogether, this particular hundred years will only yield as yet to one other century in the annals of the world. Human not all gain. There is never wanting, however, the slave to sit in the triumphal chariot, and to remind the conqueror that he is, after all, but a poor mortal. And when, with some knowledge of what has taken place since, we look over the proceedings of this century (especially as regards the discoveries triumphs and conquests with which we are at present concerned) we almost feel as if nothing had been gained for humanity, so large are the drawbacks. Not that I can believe that the world goes on toiling, and suffering, and aspiring,-yet gaining nothing; or that we are to conclude, that the conquests and discoveries of this century were not a furtherance of the intelligence and the worth of mankind. But Ignorance and Evil, even in full flight, deal terrible back-handed strokes upon their pursuers. In the very case before us, in this discovery of the Indies, what do we find? From want of understanding their fellow-men, from want of comprehending what should be the first objects of colonization, these early discoverers were doing what they could to produce a displacement of Ch. 2. human life which will be very mischievous to as Book IV. remote a period in the history of the world as we can at all presume to foresee. It is probable that no considerable changes take place even in insect life without affecting us-it may be largely and what must we expect from abrupt extinctions and introductions of races of mankind in any country; which are so many shocks, as it were, to social nature? What, but troubles and disasters of the direst kind? And such they have proved to be; large in themselves, prolific in their nature, and of vast extent in their operation. applied to To bring the above remarks closely home to Foregoing the present subject, keeping within the bounds of remarks what has already been related, let us take the Hispaniola. case of Hispaniola, and we shall see that the circumstances under which that island was occupied, were as unfavourable to human life as can well be imagined. The conquered people were employed in a manner alien from all their former pursuits, habits, and enjoyments. They worked for the production of commodities which had no interest in their eyes. They were hurried off to the mines without any suitable provision being made for a great movement of population. Nothing, in such a mode of government, had time to grow. It was not, as in older and settled countries, a surplus part of the adventurous youth that was attracted to a severe, but gainful, occupation; but the most stable and precious part of the community, such as fathers of families, was suddenly demanded for a kind of labour for which Book IV. it had received no previous training, and in the Ch. 2. profits of which it had no concern. It would have been contrary to all the laws by which life is regulated, if such a mode of proceeding had been otherwise than most fatal to the people amongst whom it was introduced. They died, as they must have died, by thousands; and the mode of supplying this vacuum was equally contradictory to the laws of nature. A sad conclusion In a limited space, like that of an island, we are able to trace clearly the results of this outrageous and barbarous statesmanship; and we must be prepared, in the course of the narrative, date, 1512. to watch the gradual extinction of the Indian inhabitants of the various West India islands, just as we might observe the extinction of so many lights which there was not air enough to support, and which die out from sheer inanition.* Such is the unwelcome but manifest conclusion which follows from our first general consideration of the various events that have already been recorded in the history of Spanish America. *Knowing the fate of these before him the few words that Indian nations, I have been are left of their languages, anxious to put on record any which may furnish some slight Indian names that occur, so clue to the genealogy of these that the ethnologist may have destroyed races. |