The preaching and the lust went on.  But the preaching sometimes addressed the sinner also.  Montesino, a Dominican preacher, attacked the cruelty of the colonists from the pulpit of San Domingo.  He was accused of treason; that is to say, the king was held to represent the policy which enslaved and destroyed the Indian.  The authorities threatened to expel the Dominicans from the island, if the preacher did not apologize and withdraw his charges.  Montesino promised soon to preach in another style.  Having filled the church with his malignant audience, he bravely maintained his position with fresh facts and arguments; he showed that the system of repartimientos, or partition of the Indians among the colonists, was more disastrous than the first system, which imposed upon each cacique a tax and left him to extort it from his subjects.  He urged the policy of interest; for the Indians, unused to labor, died in droves:  they dropped in the fields beneath the whip; they escaped by whole families to the mountains, and there perished with hunger; they threw themselves into the water, and killed each other in the forests; families committed suicide in concert;—­there would soon be no laborers, and the Spaniard could rob and murder, but would not toil.  Brave preacher, worthy mouth-piece of the humane Las Casas, what could he effect against the terrible exigency of the situation?  For here was a colony, into which all the prisons of Spain had just been emptied to repair a failing emigration,—­men bred in crime coalescing with men whose awakened passions made them candidates for prison,—­the whole community, with the exception of the preacher and his scattered sympathizers, animated by one desire, to get the gold, to exhaust the soil, to glut voluptuous immunity, to fill the veins with a fiery climate, and to hurry back with wealth enough to feed it more safely in the privacies of Madrid and Seville.  What were preaching and benevolent intention, where shaven superstition was inculcating the cross by its weight alone, and bearded ferocity desolated with the sword what the cross could spare?  The discussion which Montesino raised went home to Spain; but when a board of commissioners, charged to investigate the subject, advised that all Indians granted to Spanish courtiers, and to all other persons who did not reside upon the island, should be set at liberty, the colonists saw the entering wedge of emancipation.  The discontent was so great, and the alternative of slavery or ruin was so passionately offered to the Government at home, that the system of repartimientos remained untouched; for the Government felt that it must choose between the abandonment of the island and the destruction of those who alone, if judiciously protected, could make it profitable to retain it.

Protection and amelioration, then, became the cry.  In consequence of the great increase of cattle in the island, it was considered no more than just that the Indians should no longer be used as beasts of burden.  They were also to have one day in the seven, besides the Church festivals, for their own use; and intendants were appointed who were to have a general supervision of their affairs, and to protect them from barbarous punishments.  These regulations were a weir of reeds thrown across a turbid and tumultuous Amazon.