It rots away the ugly scaffolding up which the bold
words climbed, and men see the beautiful and tenacious arch which only
genius is daring enough and capable to build. It is delightful to
walk across the solid structure, with gratitude and taste in a
glow. We love to read indictments of an exploded crime which we have
learned to despise, or which we are committing in a novel form.
Charlevoix takes up this complaint of the imprudence of Las Casas,
and, to illustrate it, thinks that he could not have anticipated the
bad effects of the publication of his "Memoir upon the Cruelty of the
Spaniards," for it appeared during the war with the revolted
Netherlands, and was translated into Dutch by a Frenchman. "Nothing,"
he says, "so animated those people to persist in their rebellion, as
the fear, that, if they entered into any accommodation with Spain,
they would be served as the natives had been in the American
Provinces, who were never so badly oppressed as when they felt most
secure upon the faith of a treaty or convention." If the book of Las
Casas really lent courage and motive to that noble resistance, as it
undoubtedly did by confirming the mistrust of Spanish rule in the Low
Countries, the honorable distinction should be preserved by history.
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