the natives productive.  The German Governor constructed a great palisaded park, into which he managed to drive all the Indians of the neighborhood, and then informed them that they could issue from it only as slaves, unless they paid a certain ransom, whose value he fixed.  They were deliberately starved into adopting one or the other alternative.  Those who could procure gold were let out to collect it, leaving their wives and children as pledges of their return.  Many of the others preferred to die of hunger and thirst.  When the ransomed natives departed with their families, the Governor had them pursued, reparked, and subjected to a repetition of this sponging process, and again a third time, so admirably did it work.  This strikes Las Casas as a refinement of cruelty, which can be attributed only to the fact that these Germans were Lutheran heretics, and never assisted at the mass.  “This is the way,” he says, “that they conformed to the royal intention of establishing Christianity in these countries!”

How did the Spaniards conform to it?  Rude soldiers became the managers of the different working gangs into which the Indians had been divided, and it devolved upon them to superintend their spiritual welfare.  Enough has been said about their brutality; but their ignorance was no less remarkable.  Las Casas complains that they could not repeat the Credo, nor the Ten Commandments.  Their ignorance of the former would have been bliss, if they had been practically instructed in the latter.  John Colmenero was one of these common soldiers who became installed in a Commandery (Encomienda).  When the missionaries visited his plantation, they found that the laborers had not the slightest notions of Christianity.  They examined John upon the subject, and discovered to their horror that he did not know even how to make the sign of the cross.  “What have you been teaching these poor Indians?” they asked him.  “Why, that they are all going to the Devil!  Won’t your signin santin cruces help to teach them that?"[U]

[Footnote U:  Llorente, Tom.  I. p. 180.]

No doubt it would; for we know how serviceable in that way Ovando found it, when he plotted to seize the beautiful Anacaona, who governed the province of Xaragua in Hayti.  This he did, and also gave the signal for a dreadful massacre of her subjects, whom he had beguiled to a military spectacle, by lifting his hand to the cross of Alcantara that was embroidered on his dress.

Colmenero had not a head for business like that other Spaniard who baptized all the inhabitants of a village and took away their idols of gold, for which he substituted copper ones, and then compelled the natives to purchase them of him at so many slaves per idol.

“Come, then, caciques and Indians, come!” This was the ordinary style of proclamation.  “Abandon your false gods, adore the God of the Christians, profess their religion, believe in the gospel, receive the sacrament of baptism, recognize the King of Castile for your king and master.  If you refuse, we declare war upon you to kill you, to make you slaves, to spoil you of your goods, and to cause you to suffer as long and as often as we shall judge convenient,"[V] and for the good of your souls.