[Footnote J:  In Mr. Irving’s Life of Columbus, the characters of the different Indian chieftains are finely drawn, and the history of their intercourse and warfare with the Spaniards admirably told.]

Thus were the natives bound together by the polity of instinct and consanguinity alone.  They had no laws, but only natural customs.  The cacique was an arbitrator:  if his decision did not appease a litigant, the parties had an appeal to arms in his presence.  Their cacique received unbounded reverence, and for him they would freely die.  Polygamy was permitted only to him, but not always practised by him.  The Spaniards were so surprised at the readiness with which the natives gave them everything, both food and ornaments, that they declared them to be defective in the sense of property, and to have everything in common.  This was a mistake:  each man had his little possessions; stealing was punished with death, as the crime that did the greatest violence to the natural order; and crimes against domestic purity were severely punished, till the people became demoralized by their conquerors, who mistook the childish freedom of the women, for lustful invitation, and imputed to the native disposition something which belonged to their own.[K]

[Footnote K:  They even accused the natives of communicating that loathsome disease which results from promiscuous intercourse, when in fact the virus was shipped at Palos, with the other elements of civilization, to give a new world to Castile and Leon!  Nations appear to be particularly sensitive upon this point, and accuse each other.  But the first time a disorder is observed is not the date of its origin.  See the European opinion in the fifteenth century, in Roscoe’s Lorenzo de’ Medici, p. 350, and note, Bohn’s edition.  It has probably existed from the earliest times, wherever population was dense and habits depraved.  The Romans suffered from it, but, like the Europeans of the Middle Ages, did not always attribute it to its proper source.  What did Persius mean in one or two places in his Third Satire, e.g., 113-115?  And see also Celaus, Medicina, Lib.  V. Sec.3.

When the fighting-man of Europe became a mercenary, (soldier, soldner, paid-man,) he carried this tinder from country to country, and kindled the fire afresh.  The Spaniards bore it to Hayti, and it stung like a snake beneath that fervid sky.]

They were timid, credulous, extravagantly friendly, affected easily to tears, not cunning enough for their own good, and little capable of concealing or of planning anything.  Yet when their eyes were opened, and they understood at last that the strangers had not descended from the skies, their indignation and loathing were well sustained, with a frankness, indeed, which only embittered their condition.  They suffered, but could not dissimulate.