But it will be too painful to recount the various inventions for punishing these unhappy children of Nature.  The dogs, perhaps, were merciful, for they killed and ate a native on the spot.  Cutting off the ear and nose was an ordinary barbarity,—­in its origin it was a way to save time in collecting ornaments; shutting fifty or more into a house and setting it in flames was a favorite method of extemporizing a bonfire; pricking a crowd of insurgent natives over a precipice into the sea was an exceptional act of mercy,—­they would place one hand over their eyes and take the plunge.  It was a common sport to match stout Indians with the hounds, and bet upon their wrestling.  In the pearl-fisheries, in rowing galleys, in agriculture, in the mines, in carrying ship-timber, anchors, and pieces of ordnance, in transporting produce, the Spaniards wasted the natives as if they were wind-and water-power which Nature would supply without limit.  How can this ferocity be accounted for?  It consulted neither interest nor personal safety.  They raged like men stung to madness by poisonous clouds of insects; the future received no consideration; plans for improving the methods of cultivating different crops, or for introducing new staples, could not be carried out.  Once having tasted native blood, like their own dogs, the hunting mania possessed them, till two millions of Haytians alone had perished.  The population had become so reduced as early as 1508 that they were obliged to organize great Indian chases on the main-land, and a Coolie trade sprang up in the Lucayan Islands, to keep the Haytian mines and plantations supplied with hands.  Forty thousand of these Lucayans were transported, on the assurance of the Spaniards that they would be restored to the souls of their ancestry, who had gone to reside in that Mountain-land of the West.  Was there a touch of grim Spanish humor in this inducement to emigrate?  For certainly the Lucayans did very soon rejoin those departed souls.

Wine and the climate maddened these unbridled Europeans.  Avarice is a calculating passion; but here were aimless and exhausting horrors, like those which swarm in the drunkard’s corrupted brain.  What were vices at home became transformed into manias here.  The representatives of other nations were not slow to imitate the example of the possessors of Hayti.  Venezuela was ceded to a company of Germans in 1526, whose object was simply to strip the country of its treasures.  Las Casas tries to believe that the Spaniards seemed like just men by the side of these new speculators; but it was not possible to destroy natives faster than was done in the countries under Spanish rule.  The Germans, after all, were forced to employ Spaniards to pursue the Indians when they attempted to escape from this new system of farming into the mountains, and they profited so well by the lessons of their Catholic hunters, that, upon their departure, they hit upon new expedients for making