Most of the literature dealing with efforts to secure humane treatment and justice under Spanish law for the American indigenes dwells on events of the sixteenth century and frequently revolves around the crusade of Bartolomé de las Casas. This book carries the story forward to the end of the seventeenth century in Chile where stubborn Araucanian resistance gave a special urgency to matters of Indian policy.

The situation in Chile presented special problems. The Araucanians had no established tradition of rendering tribute or of producing any surplus which could be skimmed off by the conquering Spaniard. Tribute under the encomienda was limited to personal service, and the abuses which followed from this provoked a pattern of uprising and resistance which made impossible any permanent pacification of the more heavily populated zone south of the Biobio River. The area of unopposed Spanish settlement was contained further north, and a nagging, sometimes dangerous border war against the rebels was the overriding preoccupation of successive governments throughout much of the colonial period. Attempts to tame the encomienda in Chile and to enforce the royal prohibition against personal service were thus handicapped by the higher priorities of war. And the war in turn could not be brought to a peaceful conclusion as long as peace, to the Indian, meant submission to Spanish institutions of exploitation.

The story told here is that of the principal initiatives taken over a century and a half by ecclesiastics and royal officials to temper the social and physical violence of the conquest with humanity and justice. The most outspoken champion of Indian rights in the sixteenth century was a Dominican, Gil Gonzalez de San Nicolas, whose moral opposition to military conquest led him to preach sedition among the Spanish garrisons on the military frontier and to continue his campaign from the pulpits of Santiago. Early in the seventeenth century the Jesuits set an unpopular example in Chile by abolishing forced Indian labor in all of their own establishments and putting into effect a labor code centuries ahead of its time. Shortly afterward, the Jesuit, Luis de Valdivia, with support from royal officials in Lima, was able to overcome local opposition and preside for several years over a strategy of defensive warfare on the Indian frontier. This gave missionaries an opportunity to attempt a spiritual conquest of the Araucanians. There were bishops and other churchmen who sought to lighten the burdens of the conquest by appeals to conscience and royal officials who tried to moderate the abuses of personal service by legislation. But even the most signal victories of these reformers were somehow inconclusive, failing in application, or pushed aside by events. Chile was too far from the source of royal power; the claims of the encomenderos were too strong and the intransigence of the Araucanians too great a challenge to Spanish pride for the forces of law and conscience to prevail conclusively over the thrust of European conquest.

In tracing the often disconnected public and private undertakings for social justice over 165 years, Eugene H. Korth has done a commendable job of organizing difficult material. His scholarship is sound, and his judgments of men and events are cautious and balanced. He has performed a valuable service not only for students of colonial Chile, but also for those with a wider interest in the response of Spanish civilization to the moral dilemma of the Conquest.