So that this powerful spring of action, the cause of so much seeming good and real evil in the world, has no power over them.

In a word, these unhappy mortals may be compared to children, in whom the development of reason is not completed." Now all these peculiarities, although in the unenlightened states of Greece they would have entitled their possessors to immortal honor, as having reduced to practice those rigid and abstemious maxims, the mere talking about which acquired certain old Greeks the reputation of sages and philosophers; yet were they clearly proved in the present instance to betoken a most abject and brutified nature, totally beneath the human character.

But the benevolent fathers, who had undertaken to turn these unhappy savages into dumb beasts by dint of argument, advanced still stronger proofs; for as certain divines of the sixteenth century, and among the rest Lullus, affirm, the Americans go naked, and have no beards! "They have nothing," says Lullus, "of the reasonable animal, except the mask." And even that mask was allowed to avail them but little, for it was soon found that they were of a hideous copper complexion--and being of a copper complexion, it was all the same as if they were negroes--and negroes are black, "and black," said the pious fathers, devoutly crossing themselves, "is the color of the devil!" Therefore, so far from being able to own property, they had no right even to personal freedom--for liberty is too radiant a deity to inhabit such gloomy temples.

All which circumstances plainly convinced the righteous followers of Cortes and Pizarro that these miscreants had no title to the soil that they infested--that they were a perverse, illiterate, dumb, beardless, black-seed--mere wild beasts of the forests and, like them, should either be subdued or exterminated.
From the foregoing arguments, therefore, and a variety of others equally conclusive, which I forbear to enumerate, it is clearly evident that this fair quarter of the globe, when first visited by Europeans, was a howling wilderness, inhabited by nothing but wild beasts; and that the transatlantic visitors acquired an incontrovertible property therein, by the right of discovery.
This right being fully established, we now come to the next, which is the right acquired by cultivation.

"The cultivation of the soil," we are told, "is an obligation imposed by nature on mankind.