Las Casas in his Prologue establishes himself as a Christian man who writes not to please others or to flatter, but rather to cut to the moral bone of the Spanish tyranny in the New World. This Christian faith, he makes clear, is the alkali of his moral indictment.
Las Casas notes that up to the time of his writing, the picture that had been painted of the Spanish experience in the New World was a good heroic one, and he wants to erase that picture and paint some other which includes the brutality and evil of the Spanish treatment of the Indians. He intends
to pique the boasting and excessive vainglory of legion(predicate) and to unveil the injustice of not a few who take pride in pitiful deeds and execrable evil as if they could set heroic men of illustrious exploits like cattle (10).
sure the pen also takes note of the courage of the Spanish, but he places that courage in a context which is certainly uttermost more dark and evil and cowardly. At the heart of the
Las Casas not besides indicts the Spanish for their moral and other adversitys, but also makes clear his understanding of the lordliness and humanity of the Indians. After all, he is obligated to do so, because the failure to do so goes to the heart of the Spaniards' failures in the New World. Unless we hang the humanity of the Indians, we can hardly be persuaded by the author that they should have been treated humanely. Accordingly, las Casas demonstrates in detail that the Indians were humane and farther from being "tools of the devil," despite the fact that they did not share the Christian beliefs of the exploiting conquerors from the New World.
exploration of sore lands, the author writes, is a nobleman force:
Las Casas also makes clear that the discoverers and explorers from the Old World had a moral and spiritual obligation to treat the people of the new land as equals under paragon, an obligation which they miserably failed to fulfill. He believes that the Spanish and others from the Old World took upon themselves a grave state as Christians to carry not only the word of God but also the love and humanity of Christian principles to those people, and, again, the author indicts the Spanish for their failure to fulfill that responsibility.
Did we satiate them or, on the contrary, did they touch our own hunger and free us from death many times by giving us not only the bare essentials but many superfluous things as well. Oh, vicious blindness! Wicked, insensitive and detestable ungratefulness!
. . . They should have love and praised the Indians, and even learned from them, instead of belittling them by advertisement them as beastly; instead of stealing, afflicting, oppressing and annihilating them (82).
Therefore, unless they repented on their deathbeds in a way satisfactory to [God], I am panic-stricken they found themselves in a bind not worse, I hope, than that of Alexander, since the sins of Christians are much graver than the sins of infidels. And
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