298 A WISE CONCLUSION.

sword, without giving quarter, though they threw down their arms
and submitted.

In the next place, it occurred to me that albeit the usage they
thus gave one another was thus brutish and inhuman, yet it was
really nothing to me; these peopte had done me no injury... That
if they attempted me, or I saw it necessary for my immediate pre-
servation to fall upon them, something might be said for it; but
that as I was yet out of their power, and they had really no
knowledge of me, and consequently no design upon me, 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 prac-
tised in America, and where they destroyed millions of these
people, who, however they were idolaters, and barbarians, and had
several bloody and barbarous rites in their customs, such as sacri-
ficing 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 un-
natural piece of cruelty, unjustifiable either to God or man; and
such as 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 production 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.

These considerations really put me to a pause, and to a kind of a
full stop ; and I began by little and little to be off of my design,
and to conclude I had taken wrong measures in my resolutions to
attack the savages; that it was not my business to meddle with
them, unless they first attacked me, and this it was my business if
possible to prevent; but that, if I were discovered and attacked,
then I knew my duty.

On the other hand, I argued with myself, that this really was
the way not to deliver myself, but entirely to ruin and destroy
myself; for unless I was sure to kill every one that not only
should be on shore at that time, but that should ever come on