Note 1018 — Chapter V

As will appear farther on in these pages, Las Casas stands justly chargeable with enormous exaggerations of the number or estimate of the victims of Spanish cruelty. But I have not met with a single case in any contemporary writer, nor in the challengers and opponents of his pleadings at the Court of Spain, in which his hideous portrayal of the forms and methods of that cruelty, its dreadful and revolting tortures and mutilations, have been brought under question. Mr. Prescott’s fascinating volumes have been often and sometimes very sharply censured, because in the glow of romance, chivalric daring, and heroic adventure in which he sets the achievements of the Spanish “Conquerors” of the New World he would seem to be somewhat lenient to their barbarities. In the second of his admirable works he refers as follows to this stricture upon him: “To American and English readers, acknowledging so different a moral standard from that of the sixteenth century, I may possibly be thought too indulgent to the errors of the Conquerors;” and he urges that while he has “not hesitated to expose in their strongest colors the excesses of the Conquerors, I have given them the benefit of such mitigating reflections as might be suggested by the circumstances and the period in which they lived” (Preface to the Conquest of Mexico).