I debated this very
often with myself thus: "How do I know what God Himself judges in
this particular case? It is certain these people do not commit
this as a crime; it is not against their own consciences reproving,
or their light reproaching them; they do not know it to be an
offence, and then commit it in defiance of divine justice, as we do
in almost all the sins we commit. They think it no more a crime to
kill a captive taken in war than we do to kill an ox; or to eat
human flesh than we do to eat mutton."
When I considered this a little, it followed necessarily that I was
certainly in the wrong; that these people were not murderers, in
the sense that I had before condemned them in my thoughts, any more
than those Christians were murderers who often put to death the
prisoners taken in battle; or more frequently, upon many occasions,
put whole troops of men to the sword, without giving quarter,
though they threw down their arms and submitted. In the next
place, it occurred to me that although the usage they gave one
another was thus brutish and inhuman, yet it was really nothing to
me: these people had done me no injury: that if they attempted, or
I saw it necessary, for my immediate preservation, to fall upon
them, something might be said for it: but that I was yet out of
their power, and they really had no knowledge of me, and
consequently no design upon me; and therefore it could not be just
for me to fall upon them; that this would justify the conduct of
the Spaniards in all their barbarities practised in America, where
they destroyed millions of these people; who, however they were
idolators and barbarians, and had several bloody and barbarous
rites in their customs, such as sacrificing human bodies to their
idols, were yet, as to the Spaniards, very innocent people; and
that the rooting them out of the country is spoken of with the
utmost abhorrence and detestation by even the Spaniards themselves
at this time, and by all other Christian nations of Europe, as a
mere butchery, a bloody and unnatural piece of cruelty,
unjustifiable either to God or man; and for which the very name of
a Spaniard is reckoned to be frightful and terrible, to all people
of humanity or of Christian compassion; as if the kingdom of Spain
were particularly eminent for the produce of a race of men who were
without principles of tenderness, or the common bowels of pity to
the miserable, which is reckoned to be a mark of generous temper in
the mind.
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