That reading was itself without order or system, and I am
not sure but it had better been less than more.
Yet who knows? The
days, or the nights of the days, in the eighteen-fifties went quickly,
as quickly as the years go now, and it would have all come to the
present pass whether that blind devotion to an alien literature had
cloistered my youth or not.
I do not know how, with the merciful make I am of, I should then have
cared so little, or else ignored so largely the cruelties I certainly
knew that the Spaniards had practised in the conquests of Mexico and
Peru. I knew of these things, and my heart was with the Incas and the
Aztecs, and yet somehow I could not punish the Spaniards for their
atrocious destruction of the only American civilizations. As nearly as I
can now say, I was of both sides, and wistful to reconcile them, though
I do not see now how it could have been done; and in my later hopes for
the softening of the human conditions I have found it hard to forgive
Pizarro for the overthrow of the most perfectly socialized state known
to history. I scarcely realized the base ingratitude of the Spanish
sovereigns to Columbus, and there were vast regions of history that I
had not penetrated till long afterward in pursuit of Spanish perfidy and
inhumanity, as in their monstrous misrule of Holland.
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