Cruel Treatment of Native Americans by the Spanish
Moreover, the Spaniards found their first American conquests too easy,
and the rewards of these too great. This prevented all thought of
developing the country through industry, concentrating expectation
solely upon waiting fortunes, to be had from the natives by the sword or
through forced labor in mines, Their treatment of the aborigines was
nothing short of diabolical. Well has it been said: "The Spaniards had
sown desolation, havoc, and misery in and around their track. They had
depopulated some of the best peopled of the islands and renewed them
with victims deported from others. They had inflicted upon hundreds of
thousands of the natives all the forms and agonies of fiendish cruelty,
driving them to self-starvation and suicide, as a way of mercy and
release from an utterly wretched existence. They had come to be viewed
by their victims as fiends of hate, malignity, and all dark and cruel
desperation and mercilessness in passion. The hell which they denounced
upon their victims was shorn of its worst terror by the assurance that
these tormentors were not to be there. Las Casas, the noble missionary,
true soldier of the cross, and the few priests and monks who
sympathized with him, in vain protested against these cruelties."
