Of Coaches

It is very easy to verify that great authors, when they write of causes, note not only those they think true, but also those they believe not, provided they have some beauty and invention. They speak of things sufficiently and elegantly enough, but not sufficiently accurately. I myself have kept a sort of register of surprising things I have read or heard, but I begin to lose faith in marvels the more I learn how readily men are deceived.

So many cities razed to the ground, so many nations exterminated, so many millions of people put to the sword, and the richest and most beautiful part of the world turned upside down for the traffic in pearls and pepper. Mechanical victories! Never did ambition, never did public enmities, impel men against men to such horrible acts of enmity and such miserable calamities. Coasting along the sea in quest of their mines, some men have found a people that could not endure the smell of gold, and who threw it away as dung.

Had we come amongst them with offers of fraternity and goodwill, what might not have been accomplished — for those nations were so marvellously disposed toward it?

These people of the New World were, by all accounts, gentle and accommodating, curious and open to wonder. They received the strangers with gifts and with ceremony. They were not without laws, not without order, not without courage. What they lacked was iron and disease, and these the Europeans brought in quantity. I call it not conquest but infection — not only of the body, but of every social arrangement those peoples had constructed over centuries.

What rankles most is not the cruelty itself, terrible as it was, but its justification. Men who would shudder to mistreat a dog in their own village were content to burn a village on the other side of the world, provided there was profit in it and a priest to say the words. The coaches of the conquerors, draped in gold, were pulled through streets emptied by plague and slaughter. Never has ostentation sat so ill upon its bearers. We talk much of barbarians; I have found them, and they came from our side of the water.