alike are blotted out and perish.  If we do not forgive them, at least we cease to hate them, as it grows more clear to us that they injured none so deeply as themselves.  But the Theriodes kakia, the enormous wickedness by which humanity itself has been outraged and disgraced, we cannot forgive, we cannot cease to hate that; the years roll away, but the tints of it remain on the pages of history, deep and horrible as the day on which they were entered there.

“When the Spaniards understood the simple opinion of the Yucaian islanders concerning the souls of their departed, which, after their sins purged in the cold northern mountains should pass into the south, to the intent that, leaving their own country of their own accord, they might suffer themselves to be brought to Hispaniola, they did persuade those poor wretches, that they came from those places where they should see their parents and children, and all their kindred and friends that were dead, and should enjoy all kinds of delights with the embracements and fruition of all beloved beings.  And they, being infected and possessed with these crafty and subtle imaginations, singing and rejoicing left their country, and followed vain and idle hope.  But when they saw that they were deceived, and neither met their parents nor any that they desired, but were compelled to undergo grievous sovereignty and command, and to endure cruel and extreme labour, they either slew themselves, or, choosing to famish, gave up their fair spirits, being persuaded by no reason or violence to take food.  So these miserable Yucaians came to their end.”

It was once more as it was in the days of the apostles.  The New World was first offered to the holders of the old traditions.  They were the husbandmen first chosen for the new vineyard, and blood and desolation were the only fruits which they reared upon it.  In their hands it was becoming a kingdom not of God, but of the devil, and a sentence of blight went out against them and against their works.  How fatally it has worked, let modern Spain and Spanish America bear witness.  We need not follow further the history of their dealings with the Indians.  For their colonies, a fatality appears to have followed all attempts at Catholic colonization.  Like shoots from an old decaying tree which no skill and no care can rear, they were planted, and for a while they might seem to grow; but their life was never more than a lingering death, a failure, which to a thinking person would outweigh in the arguments against Catholicism whole libraries of faultless calenas, and a consensus patrum unbroken through fifteen centuries for the supremacy of St. Peter.