and in the succeeding years the missionaries gradually extended this
area by forming settlements from among the wilder peoples, whom they
persuaded to abandon the more objectionable features of their old
roving, often predatory, life and to group themselves into towns and
villages "under the bell."

The tactics employed in the conquest and the subsequent behavior of
the conquerors were true to the old Spanish nature, so succinctly
characterized by a plain-spoken Englishman of Mary's reign, when the
war-cry of Castile encircled the globe and even hovered ominously
near the "sceptered isle," when in the intoxication of power character
stands out so sharply defined: "They be verye wyse and politicke, and
can, thorowe ther wysdome, reform and brydell theyr owne natures for
a tyme, and applye ther conditions to the manners of those men with
whom they meddell gladlye by friendshippe; whose mischievous maners
a man shall never know untyll he come under ther subjection; but then
shall he parfectlye parceve and fele them: for in dissimulations untyll
they have ther purposes, and afterwards in oppression and tyrannye,
when they can obtain them, they do exceed all other nations upon
the earthe." [1]

In the working out of this spirit, with all the indomitable courage
and fanatical ardor derived from the long contests with the Moors,
they reduced the native peoples to submission, but still not to the
galling yoke which they fastened upon the aborigines of America, to
make one Las Casas shine amid the horde of Pizarros. There was some
compulsory labor in timber-cutting and ship-building, with enforced
military service as rowers and soldiers for expeditions to the Moluccas
and the coasts of Asia, but nowhere the unspeakable atrocities which
in Mexico, Hispaniola, and South America drove mothers to strangle