in

very simply, to ask him how many prisoners they had taken. The man replied with a look which I shall never forget-he clenched his teeth, opened his lips, and then sawing his fingers across his bare throat for a quarter of a minute, bending towards me, with his spurs sticking into his horse's sides, he said, in a sort of low, choking voice, Se matan todas,'-we kill them all!" Here then we have a thinly populated country habited, so far as it is inhabited at all, by men that are inspired towards each other by the spirit of fiends. It is impossible that civilization can ever come there except by some fresh and powerful revolution. We hear of the new republics of South America, and naturally look for more evidences of good from the spirit of liberty: but in the towns we find the people indolent, ignorant, superstitious, and most filthy; and in the country naked Indians on horseback, scouring the wilds, and making use of the very animals by which the Spaniards subjugated them, to scourge and exterminate their descendants. In the opinion of Captain Head, they only want fire-arms, which one day they may get, to drive them out altogether! And what are they whom they would drive out? Only another kind of savages. People who, calling themselves Christians, live in most filthy huts swarming with vermin-sit on skeletons of horses' heads instead of chairs-lie during summer out of doors in promiscuous groups-and live entirely on beef and water; the beef, chiefly mare's flesh, being roasted on a long spit, and every one sitting round and cutting off pieces with long knives. The cruelty and beastliness of their nature exceeding even that of the Indians themselves.

This then is the result of three centuries of bloodshed and tyranny in those regions-one species of barbarism merely substituted for another. What a different scene to that which the same countries would now have exhibited, had the Jesuits not been violently expelled from their work of civilization by the lust of gold and despotism. "When we compare," says Captain Head, "the relative size of America with the rest of the world, it is singular to reflect on the history of these fellow-creatures, who are the aborigines of the land; and after viewing the wealth and beauty of so interesting a country, it is painful to consider what the sufferings of the Indians have been, and still may be. Whatever may be their physical or natural character*. . . still they are the human beings placed there by the Almighty; the country belonged to them; and they are therefore entitled to the regard of every man who has religion enough to believe that God has made nothing in vain, or whose mind is just enough to respect the persons and the rights of his fellow-creatures."

The view I have been enabled in my space to take of the treatment of the South Americans by their invaders, is necessarily a mere glance,-for, unfor

* "I sincerely believe they are as fine a set of men as ever existed, under the circumstances in which they are placed. In the mines I have seen them using tools which our miners declared they had not strength to work with, and carrying burdens which no man in England could support; and I appeal to those travellers who have been carried over the snow on their backs, whether they were able to have returned the compliment; and if not, what can be more grotesque than the figure of a civilized man riding upon the shoulders of a fellow-creature whose physical strength he has ventured to despise ?" Head's Rough Notes, p. 112.

tunately for the Christian name and the name of humanity, the history of blood and oppression there is not more dreadful than it is extensive. I have not

staid to describe the conduct of the French, Dutch, and English, in their possessions on the southern continent, simply because they are only too much like those of the Spaniards and Portuguese-they form no bright exception, and we shall only too soon meet with these refined nations in other regions.

Note.-The fate of Venezuela ought not to be quite passed over. It is a striking instance of the indifference with which the lives and fortunes of a whole nation are often handed over by great kings to destruction as a mere matter of business. Charles V. of Spain being deeply indebted to a trading house of Augsburgh, the Welsers, gave them this province. They, in their turn, made it over to some German military mercenaries, who overrun the whole country in search of mines, and plundered and oppressed the people with the most dreadful rapacity. In the course of a few years their avarice and exactions had so completely exhausted and ruined the province that the Germans threw it up, and it fell again into the hands of the Spaniards, but in such a miserable condition that it continued to languish and drag on a miserable existence, if it has even recovered from its fatal injuries at the present time.

CHAPTER XIII.

THE PORTUGUESE IN INDIA.

Son mui buenos Catolicos, pero mui malos Christianos;-They are very good Catholics, but nevertheless very bad Christians indeed.

Saying of an old Catholic priest. Ward's Mexico. Most of the countries in India have been filled with tyrants who prefer piracy to commerce-who acknowledge no right but that of power; and think that whatever is practicable is just.

The Abbé Raynal.

SCARCELY had Columbus made known the New World when the Portuguese, under Vasco de Gama, opened the sea-path to the East Indies. Those affluent and magnificent regions, which had so long excited the wonder and cupidity of Europe, and whose gems, spices, and curious fabrics, had been introduced overland by the united exertions of the Arabs, the Venetians, and Genoese, were now made accessible by the great highway of the ocean; and the Pope generously gave all of them to the Portuguese! The language of the Pontiff was like the language of another celebrated character to our Saviour, and founded on about as much real right: "All these kingdoms will I give unto thee, if thou wilt fall down

and worship me." The Portuguese were nothing loath. They were, in the expressive language of a great historian, "all on fire for plunder and the propagation of their religion!" Away, therefore, they hastened, following the sinuous guidance of those African coasts which they had already traced out-on which they had already commenced that spoliation and traffic in men which for three centuries was to grow only more and more extensive, dreadful, and detestable-"those countries where," says M. Malte Brun, "tyranny and ignorance have not had the power to destroy the inexhaustible fecundity of the soil, but have made them, down to the present times, the theatre of eternal robbery, and one vast market of human blood."

They landed in Calicut, under Gama, in 1498, and speedily gave sufficient indications of the object of their visit, and the nature of their character. But in India they had more formidable obstacles to their spirit of dominance and extermination than they and the Spaniards had found in the New World. They beheld themselves on the limits of a vast region, inhabited by a hundred millions of people-countries of great antiquity, of a higher civilization, and under the rule of active and military princes. Populous cities, vast and ancient temples, palaces, and other public works; a native literature, science handed down from far-off times, and institutions of a fixed and tenacious caste, marked them as a people not so easily to be made a prey of as the Mexicans or Peruvians. Peaceful as were the habits, and bloodless as were the religion and the social principles of a vast body of the Hindoos, their rulers, whether the de