This order was executed by Pedro de la
Gasca. Manumission took place as well in Hispaniola as on the Continent;
but on the return of Gasca to Spain, and the retirement of Charles into
a monastery, slavery was revived.
It is impossible to pass over this instance of the abolition of slavery
by Charles, in all his foreign dominions, without some comments. It
shows him, first, to have been a friend both to the Indians and the
Africans, as a part of the human race; it shows he was ignorant of what
he was doing when he gave his sanction to this cruel trade; it shows
when legislators give one set of men undue power over another, how
quickly they abuse it, or he never would have found himself obliged, in
the short space of twenty-five years, to undo that which he had
countenanced as a great state measure; and while it confirms the former
lesson to statesmen of watching the beginnings or principles of things
in their political movements, it should teach them never to persist in
the support of evils, through the false shame of being obliged to
confess that they had once given them their sanction, nor to delay the
cure of them because, politically speaking, neither this nor that is the
proper season; but to do them away instantly, as there can only be one
fit or proper time in the eye of religion, namely, on the conviction of
their existence.
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