putting a period to the term of slavery—­the natives would be marched off, probably many days’ journey from their homes and families, and set to work under a Spanish foreman.  The work, as we have already seen, was infinitely harder than that to which they were accustomed; and most serious of all, it was done under conditions that took all the heart out of the labour.  A man will toil in his own garden or in tilling his own land with interest and happiness, not counting the hours which he spends there; knowing in fact that his work is worth doing, because he is doing it for a good reason.  But put the same man to work in a gang merely for the aggrandisement of some other over-man; and the heart and cheerfulness will soon die out of him.

It was so with these children of the sun.  They were put to work ten times harder than any they had ever done before, and they were put to it under the lash.  The light diet of their habit had been sufficient to support them in their former existence of happy idleness and dalliance, and they had not wanted anything more than their cassava bread and a little fish and fruit; now, however, they were put to work at a pressure which made a very different kind of feeding necessary to them, and this they did not get.  Now and then a handful of pork would be divided among a dozen of them, but they were literally starved, and were accustomed to scramble like dogs for the bones that were thrown from the tables of the Spaniards, which bones they ground up and mixed with their, bread so that no portion of them might be lost.  They died in numbers under these hard conditions, and, compared with their lives, their deaths must often have been happy.  When the time came for them to go home they were generally utterly worn out and crippled, and had to face a long journey of many days with no food to support them but what they could get on the journey; and the roads were strewn with the dead bodies of those who fell by the way.

And far worse things happened to them than labour and exhaustion.  It became the custom among the Spaniards to regard the lives of the natives as of far less value than those of the dogs that were sometimes set upon them in sport.  A Spaniard riding along would make a wager with his fellow that he would cut the head off a native with one stroke of his sword; and many attempts would be laughingly made, and many living bodies hideously mutilated and destroyed, before the feat would be accomplished.  Another sport was one similar to pigsticking as it is practised in India, except that instead of pigs native women and children were stuck with the lances.  There was no kind of mutilation and monstrous cruelty that was not practised.  If there be any powers of hell, they stalked at large through the forests and valleys of Espanola.  Lust and bloody cruelty, of a kind not merely indescribable but unrealisable by sane men and women, drenched the once happy island with anguish and terror.  And in payment for it the Spaniards undertook to teach the heathen the Christian religion.