There is no doubt that every incident that Las Casas relates as coming within his own knowledge and observation is true, though Prescott describes "the good Bishop's arithmetic as coming from the heart than from the head" and historians generally have been inclined to doubt his figures. His description of the mild and friendly character of the natives of the islands was doubtless exact, but when he extends it to include the fierce and warlike tribes of the mainland, his generalisations are seen to be misleading. None of the peoples of Anáhuac could be truthfully described as "gentle lambs" or as "humble, submissive, and docile, knowing no evil and neither possessing nor understanding the use of weapons." Slavery was everywhere established, with its attendant abuses and evils, and it was slavery that Las Casas combated. It must be borne in mind that Las Casas was a man in whom humanitarianism overshadowed every other sentiment, that he was of an ardent, impressionable and imaginative temperament, with sensibilities of the most delicate sort; moreover, he was an apostle, the defender of an oppressed people, whom he had taken under his protection and whose cause it was the mission of his life to sustain and defend. The violation of divine and human justice had been erected into a system by the conquerors and discoverers and nothing, in his eyes, could palliate the evils which that system fostered, and by which the colonists prospered, while the native races were dwindling to extinction. Beyond these primary facts, he refused to see; of them, he had seen more than enough to inflame his indignation and start him upon the crusade for which his iron constitution, his superior intellectual powers, and his resistless eloquence were alone adequate. He was frequently betrayed into invective, and his denunciations are as fierce as language could make them, while the energetic terms in which he depicts, in all their bald horror, the revolting inhumanity of his countrymen provoke a shudder. The Brevissima Relacion is not literature for sensitive readers.
CHAPTER XV. - THE BISHOPRICS OFFERED TO LAS CASAS. HIS CONSECRATION. HIS DEPARTURE
Copies of the New Laws, accompanied by a royal letters of instruction, were sent, not only to the viceroys, governors, and Audiencias in America, but also to the priors of the different convents, so that the knowledge of their provisions might be as widely diffused as possible and the vigilance of the friars excited to see that they were obeyed both in the letter and the spirit. Las Casas went from Valencia to Barcelona to thank the Emperor, and while there, the royal secretary, Francisco de los Cobos, waited on him one Sunday afternoon, bearing his appointment by the Emperor to the newly erected bishopric of Cuzco, which, for extent of territory, number of inhabitants, and vast resources, was the richest in the New World. Such a recognition from the sovereign could not be otherwise than welcome to Las Casas, who was perhaps the most abused man of his time both in America and Spain, but his determination not to accept the dignity was positive, though veiled at the outset under the plea that, being a Dominican and bound by the rule of obedience, he could not receive the royal nomination without the previous consent of his superiors.