George Bancroft, History of the Colonization of the United States, Vol. 1, 17th edition.

[171] at Seville was consulted, to learn how many slaves

Chap. V.}

would be required. It had been proposed to allow four for each Spanish emigrant; deliberate calculation fixed the number esteemed necessary at four thousand. The year in which Charles V. led an expedition against Tunis, to check the piracies of the Barbary states, and to emancipate Christian slaves in Africa, he gave an open sanction to the African slave trade. The sins of the Moors were to be revenged on the negroes; and the monopoly for eight years of annually importing four thousand slaves into the West Indies, was eagerly seized by La Bresa, a favorite of the Spanish monarch, and was sold to the Genoese, who purchased their cargoes of Portugal. We shall, at a later period, observe a stipulation for this lucrative monopoly, in a treaty of peace, established by a European congress; shall witness the sovereign of the most free state in Europe stipulating for a fourth part of its profits; and shall trace its intimate connection with the first in that series of wars which led to the emancipation of America. Las Casas lived to repent of his hasty benevolence, declaring afterwards that the captivity of black men is as iniquitous as that of Indians; and he feared the wrath of divine justice for having favored the importation of negro slaves into the western hemisphere. But covetousness, and not a mistaken compassion, established the slave trade, which had nearly received its development before the voice of charity was heard in defence of the Indians. Reason,¹ policy, and religion, alike condemned the