and it is open for anyone to say the Jesuits, as they were Jesuits,
could do nothing good. Still, I believe that Father Ruiz Montoya --
whose story I have told, how falteringly, and with how little justice
to his greatness, none knows better than myself -- was a good man --
that is, a man without ulterior motives, and actuated but
by his love to the poor Indians with whom he passed his life.
To-day, when no one can see good in anything or anybody
outside the somewhat beefy pale of the Anglo-Saxon race, I do not hope
that such a mere dabbler in the great mystery of history as I am myself
will for an instant change one preconceived opinion; for I am well aware
that speeches based on facts are impotent in popular assemblies
to change a single vote.

It is an article of Anglo-Saxon faith that all the Spanish colonies
were mal-administered, and all the Spanish conquerors
bloodthirsty butchers, whose sole delight was blood. This, too,
from the members of a race who . . .; but `In the multitude of the greyhounds
is the undoing of the hare.' Therefore, I ask those who imagine
that all Spaniards at the conquest of America were ruffians,
to consider the career of Alvar Nunez, who also struts through
his brief chapter in the pages of my most imperfect book.
Still, I admit men of the stamp of Alvar Nunez are most rare,
and were still rarer in the sixteenth century; and to find many
of the Ruiz Montoya brand, Diogenes would have needed a lantern
fitted with electric light. In the great controversy which engaged
the pens of many of the best writers of the world last century,
after the Jesuits were expelled from Spain and her colonial possessions
(then almost half the world), it will be found that amongst all the mud
so freely flung about, the insults given and received, hardly anyone
but a few ex-Jesuits had any harm to say of the doings of the Order