The Origins of International Law
When the four hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s discovery of America was observed in 1892, the atmosphere was one of celebration. Columbus was a brave and skilled navigator who had brought two worlds together and changed history forever. The Knights of Columbus even put his name forward for canonization.
A century later, the prevailing mood was far more somber. Now Columbus was accused of all kinds of terrible crimes, ranging from environmental devastation to cruelties that culminated in genocide. Author Kirkpatrick Sale described the events of 1492 as the “conquest of paradise,” as peaceful, environmentally friendly peoples were violently displaced by avaricious European conquerors. At the very least, the emphasis was now on European mistreatment of native populations, and particularly on the employment of natives as forced laborers.
The debate over the consequences of this meeting of cultures has remained contentious ever since. Those who would defend the Europeans in general and Columbus in particular have replied to the likes of Kirkpatrick Sale by suggesting that European crimes have been exaggerated, that the greatest toll on native lives came from disease (a non-volitional and therefore morally neutral source) rather than from exploitation or military force, that native populations were neither as peaceful nor as solicitous of environmental welfare as their modern-day admirers have suggested, and so on.
Here we shall consider the question from an angle that is frequently overlooked. Reports of Spanish mistreatment of the New World natives prompted a severe crisis of conscience among significant sectors of the Spanish population in the sixteenth century, not least among philosophers and theologians. This fact alone indicates that we are witnessing something historically unusual; nothing in the historical record suggests that Attila the Hun had any moral qualms about his conquests, and the large-scale human sacrifice that was so fundamental to Aztec civilization appears to have elicited no outpouring of self-criticism and philosophical reflection among Aztecs comparable to what European misbehavior provoked among Catholic theologians in sixteenth-century Spain.
It was in the course of that philosophical reflection that Spanish theologians achieved something rather substantial: the beginnings of modern international law. Thus the controversy surrounding the natives of America provided an opportunity for the elucidation of general principles that states were morally bound to observe in their interactions with each other.
Laws governing the interaction of states had remained vague throughout the years, and had never been articulated in any clear way. The circumstances arising from the discovery of the New World gave impetus to the study and delineation of those laws.1 Students of international law have often looked to the sixteenth century, when theologians applied themselves to a serious reckoning with these issues, to find the origins of their discipline. Here again does the Catholic Church give birth to a distinctly Western idea.
The first major broadside by a churchman against Spanish colonial policy came in December 1511, on the island of Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic). In a dramatic sermon on the text “I am a voice crying in the wilderness,” a Dominican friar named Antonio de Montesinos, speaking on behalf of the island’s small Dominican community, proceeded to level a series of criticisms and condemnations at Spanish policy toward the Indians. According to historian Lewis Hanke, the sermon, delivered with important Spanish authorities in the audience, “was designed to shock and terrify its hearers.” And indeed it must have:
In order to make your sins against the Indians known to you I have come up on this pulpit, I who am a voice of Christ crying in the wilderness of this island, and therefore it behooves you to listen, not with careless attention, but with all your heart and senses, so that you may hear it; for this is going to be the strangest voice that ever you heard, the harshest and hardest and most awful and most dangerous that ever you expected to hear. . . . This voice says that you are in mortal sin, that you live and die in it, for the cruelty and tyranny you use in dealing with these innocent people. Tell me, by what right or justice do you keep these Indians in such a cruel and horrible servitude? On what authority have you waged a detestable war against these people, who dwelt quietly and peacefully on their own land?. . . Why do you keep them so oppressed and weary, not giving them enough to eat nor taking care of them in their illness? For with the excessive work you demand of them they fall ill and die, or rather you kill them with your desire to extract and acquire gold every day. And what care do you take that they should be instructed in religion?. . .Are these not men? Have they not rational souls? Are you not bound to love them as you love yourselves?. . .Be certain that, in such a state as this, you can no more be saved than the Moors or Turks.2
Stunned by this withering rebuke, the leading men of the island, including Admiral Diego Columbus, engaged in lively and vocal protest, demanding that Father Montesinos retract his appalling statements. The Dominicans decided to send Father Montesinos to preach again on the following Sunday, at which time he would do his best to satisfy his antagonized hearers and to explain what he had said.
When it came time for what Diego Columbus and others hoped would be a retraction, Father Montesinos adopted as the basis for his retraction a verse from Job: “I will go back over my knowledge from the beginning and I will prove that my discourse is without falsehood.” He proceeded to review the charges he had made the previous week and to demonstrate that none had been without foundation. He concluded by telling them that none of the friars would hear their confessions (since the Spanish colonial officials possessed neither contrition nor any plans to amend their behavior), and that they could write to Castile and tell that to anyone they liked.3
By the time the news of these two sermons reached King Ferdinand in Spain, the friar’s remarks had been distorted to the point that they provoked the surprise both of the king and of the Dominicans’ own provincial. Undaunted, Montesinos and his superior went to Spain to present their side of the story to the king. An attempt to interfere with Montesinos’s determination to speak to Ferdinand backfired when a Franciscan, sent to the king’s court to speak against the Dominicans in Hispaniola, was persuaded by Montesinos to adopt the Dominicans’ position.
At this point, the king, faced with dramatic testimony regarding Spanish behavior in the New World, called together a group of theologians and jurists to develop laws that would govern Spanish officials in their interaction with the natives. In this way were born the Laws of Burgos (1512) and of Valladolid (1513). Similar arguments influenced the so-called New Laws of 1542. Much of this legislation on behalf of the natives proved disappointing in its application and enforcement, particularly since so much distance separated the Spanish Crown from the scene of activity in the New World. But this early criticism helped to set the stage for the more systematic and lasting work of some of the great sixteenth-century theological jurists.
Among the most illustrious of these thinkers was Father Francisco de Vitoria. In the course of his own critique of Spanish policy, Vitoria laid the groundwork for modern international law theory, and for that reason is sometimes called “the father of international law,”4 a man who “propose[d] for the first time international law in modern terms.”5 With his fellow theological jurists, Vitoria “defended the doctrine that all men are equally free; on the basis of natural liberty, they proclaimed their right to life, to culture, and to property.”6 In support of his assertions, Vitoria drew from both Scripture and reason. In so doing he “furnished the world of his day with its first masterpiece on the law of nations in peace as well as in war.”7 It was a Catholic priest, therefore, who brought forth the first grand treatise on the law of nations—no small accomplishment.
Born around 1483, Vitoria had entered the Dominican order in 1504. He was skilled in languages and knowledgeable in the classics. He made his way to the University of Paris, where he completed his studies in the liberal arts and went on to study theology. He lectured at Paris until his departure in 1523, when he continued his theological lectures at Valladolid at the College of San Gregorio. Three years later he was elected to the Prime Chair of Theology at the University of Salamanca, where so much profound thought in so many areas would take place over the course of the sixteenth century. In 1532, he delivered a famous series of lectures that were later published as Relección de los Indios, usually rendered as Readings on the Indians and on the Law of War, which set forth important principles of international law in the context of a defense of the Indians’ rights. When this great thinker was invited to attend the Council of Trent, he indicated that he would more likely go to the other world, which he did in 1546.
Father Vitoria was best known for his commentaries on Spanish colonialism in the New World, in which he and other Spanish theologians examined the morality of Spanish behavior. Did the Spanish possess just title to lands in the Americas that had been claimed on behalf of the Crown? What were their obligations to the natives? Such issues inevitably prompted more general and universal questions. What behavior were states obligated to observe in their interactions with one another? Under what circumstances may a state justly go to war? These questions are obviously fundamental to modern international law theory.
It was and is commonplace among Christian thinkers that man enjoys a unique position within God’s creation. Having been created in God’s image and endowed with a rational nature, he possesses a dignity that all other creatures lack.8 It was on this basis that Vitoria continued the development of the idea that by virtue of his position, man was entitled to a degree of treatment from his fellow human beings that no other creature could claim.
Vitoria borrowed two important principles from Saint Thomas Aquinas: 1) the divine law, which proceeds from grace, does not annul human law, which proceeds from natural reason; and 2) those things that are natural to man are neither to be taken from nor given to him on account of sin.9 Surely no Catholic would argue that it is a less serious crime to murder a non-baptized person than a baptized one. This is what Vitoria meant: The treatment to which all human beings are entitled—e.g., not to be killed, expropriated, etc.—derives from their status as men rather than as members of the faithful in the state of grace. Father Domingo de Soto, Vitoria’s colleague at the University of Salamanca, stated the matter plainly: “Those who are in the grace of God are not a whit better off than the sinner or the pagan in what concerns natural rights.”10
From these principles adopted from Saint Thomas, Vitoria argued that man was not deprived of civil dominion by mortal sin, and that the right to appropriate the things of nature for one’s own use (i.e., the institution of private property) belonged to all men regardless of their paganism or whatever barbarian vices they might possess. The Indians of the New World, by virtue of being men, were therefore equal to the Spaniards in matters of natural rights. They owned their lands by the same principles that the Spaniards owned theirs.11 As Vitoria wrote, “The upshot of all the preceding is, then, that the aborigines undoubtedly had true dominion in both public and private matters, just like Christians, and that neither their princes nor private persons could be despoiled of their property on the ground of their not being true owners.”12
Vitoria also argued, as did fellow scholastics Domingo de Soto and Luis de Molina, that pagan princes ruled legitimately. He pointed out that the well-known scriptural admonitions to be subject to the secular powers had all been made in the context of pagan rule. If a pagan king has committed no other crime, says Vitoria, he may not be deposed simply because he is a pagan.13 It was with this principle in mind that Christian Europe was to interact with the polities of the New World. “In the conception of the well-informed and well-balanced professor of Salamanca,” writes a twentieth-century admirer, “states, irrespective of their size, their forms of government, their religion as well as that of their subjects, citizens, and inhabitants, their civilization, advanced or incipient, are equal in that system of law which he [Vitoria] professes.”14 Each state has the same rights as any other, and is under an obligation to respect the rights of others. In Vitoria’s thinking, “the outlying principalities of America were regarded as States, and their subjects entitled to the same rights, and privileges, and subjected to the same duties as the Christian kingdoms of Spain, France, and of Europe generally.”15
Vitoria did believe that the peoples of the New World had an obligation to permit Catholic missionaries to preach the Gospel in their lands. But he absolutely insisted that rejection of the Gospel did not constitute grounds for a just war. Himself a Thomist, Vitoria recalled the argument of Saint Thomas Aquinas whereby coercion was not to be applied in the conversion of pagans to the faith, since (in Saint Thomas’s words) “to believe depends upon the will,” and therefore must involve a free act.16 Thus the Fourth Council of Toledo (633) had condemned the practice of compelling Jews to receive baptism.17
Vitoria and his allies believed that natural law existed not just among Christians but among all peoples. That is, they believed in the existence of “a natural system of ethics which neither depended on nor contradicted Christian revelation but could stand by itself.”18 This did not imply that societies would not pervert that law, or fail in their application of one of its precepts, or indeed simply be ignorant of its implications in a given area. Such difficulties aside, these Spanish theologians believed with Saint Paul that the natural law was written on the human heart, and they therefore possessed a basis on which to establish international rules of conduct that could morally bind even those who had never heard (or had actually rejected) the Gospel. Such peoples were still thought to possess the basic sense of right and wrong, summed up in the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule—both of which some theologians all but identified with the natural law itself—from which international obligations could be derived.
Another conclusion followed from the natives’ possession of the substance of the natural law. A number of theologians specifically described natural law as the unique inheritance of human beings rather than as a possession of man and brute alike. This point served as “the basis of a theory of the dignity of man and the gulf between him and the rest of the animal and created world.”19 One scholar concludes that this view of the natural law as something common to all human beings, and to human beings alone, led “to a firm belief that the Indians of the New World, as well as other pagans, had natural rights of their own, the infringement of which no superior civilization or even superior religion could justify.”20
Some had argued that the natives of the New World lacked reason, or at the very least suffered from unsoundness of mind, and thereby could possess no dominion over things. Vitoria’s reply to this argument was twofold. First, he said, a deficiency of reason among some population would not justify the subjugation or despoiling of that people, for their diminished intellectual capacities did not render nugatory their claims to private ownership: “It seems that they can still have dominion, because they can suffer wrong; therefore they have a right, but”—and here Vitoria hesitates—“whether they can have civil dominion is a question which I leave to the jurists.”21 Yet this was largely a hypothetical question in any event, Vitoria suggested, for the American Indians were not irrational in the first place. They were indeed endowed with reason, that characteristic possession of the human person. Developing Aristotle’s principle that nature does nothing in vain, he wrote:
According to the truth of the matter they are not irrational, but they have the use of reason in their own way. This is clear because they have a certain order in their affairs, ordered cities, separate marriages, magistrates, rulers, laws. . . . Also they do not err in things that are evident to others, which is evidence of the use of reason. Again, God and nature do not fail for a great part of a species in what is necessary. But the special quality in man is reason, and potency which is not actualized is in vain.
In his last two sentences, Vitoria means that it was not possible to conceive of an entire portion of the human race deprived of reason, man’s great distinguishing characteristic, for God would not fail to endow such a portion of mankind with that gift that gave man his special dignity among creatures.22
Although Vitoria’s work was perhaps the most systematic of the sixteenth-century thinkers who explored these issues, perhaps the best-known native critic of Spanish policy was the priest and bishop Bartolomé de Las Casas, upon whom we rely for what information we possess about Antonio de Montesinos, the friar whose famous sermons had launched the entire controversy. Las Casas, whose doctrine appears to have been profoundly influenced by the professors of Salamanca, shared Vitoria’s position on the rationality of the natives: if a sizable portion of the human race were without reason, we should be forced to speak of a defect in the order of creation. If so considerable a portion of mankind lacked the very faculty that distinguished man from the brutes and by which he could call upon and love God, God’s intention to call all men to Himself would have failed. For the Christian, such a conclusion was simply unthinkable. This was Las Casas’s reply to those who would argue that the natives constituted an example of what Aristotle had described as “slaves by nature”—there were far too many of them, and in any case they did not exhibit the level of debasement that Aristotle’s conception appeared to call for. Ultimately, though, Las Casas was prepared to reject Aristotle on this point. He suggested that the natives “be attracted gently, in accordance with Christ’s doctrine,” and proposed that Aristotle’s views on natural slavery be abandoned, since “we have in our favor Christ’s mandate: love your neighbor as yourself . . . although he [Aristotle] was a great philosopher, study alone did not make him worthy of reaching God.”23
In 1550, a momentous debate took place between Las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, the philosopher and theologian who famously contended for the use of force against the natives. One scholar calls it “the clearest instance of an imperial power openly questioning the legitimacy of its rights and the ethical basis of its political actions.”24 Both men supported missionary activity among the natives and wanted to win them for the Church, but Las Casas insisted that the process occur peacefully. Sepúlveda did not argue that the Spaniards had a right to conquer the native peoples simply because the latter were pagans; his argument was that their low level of civilization and their barbaric practices were obstacles to their conversion, and that some kind of Spanish tutelage was therefore necessary before the evangelization process could proceed in earnest. He was well aware that circumstances or the difficulties that arise in the practical application of a sound theory—in this case, a theory that would morally justify war against the Indians—could affect the wisdom of putting it into practice at a given moment. What concerned him more was the fundamental question of whether war against the Indians could be shown theoretically to be just.
Las Casas was absolutely convinced that in practice such wars would be disastrous to the people involved and deleterious to the spread of the Gospel. In his view, the situation in America was “so dramatic and so all-inclusive that cold, academic speculation on the subject seems irresponsible, frivolous, and shocking.”25 Given the frailty of human nature, Las Casas considered these negative consequences to be inherent in the use of force against the natives, and argued accordingly that the use of coercion in any form was morally unacceptable. Las Casas forbade coercion both in compelling belief and also in the attempt to create a peaceful environment for missionaries to do their work, which Sepúlveda would have allowed.
Vitoria, on the other hand, allowed for the legitimate use of force against the natives on several limited grounds, including to protect them from subjection to the sometimes barbarian practices of their native cultures. For Las Casas, this argument was far too great a concession to the passions and imaginations of greedy and violent men, who would surely exploit such a potentially limitless concession for war. In his famous debate with Sepúlveda, after providing a lengthy list of arguments against his opponent’s position, he noted that even in the hypothetical case that Sepúlveda was correct, his opponent should nevertheless keep his views to himself. Las Casas felt this way, two modern scholars explain, because of “the scandal he [Sepúlveda] was causing and the encouragement he was giving to men of violent tendencies.”26 Las Casas believed that the myriad consequences of war, both intended and unintended, would more than offset any claim to be helping suffering natives—a point that critics of modern humanitarian military interventions continue to make to good effect to this day.27
“In order to put an end to all violence against the Indians,” writes a modern study, “Las Casas needed to show that, for one reason or another, all war against them was unjust.” For that reason, he made a strenuous effort to overturn any argument that, seeking to limit war, might nevertheless leave war open as a licit option.28 Such “pacification” measures, Las Casas was convinced, would certainly harm the missionary effort, since the presence of armed men would dispose the wills and intellects of the natives against any member of the invading party, missionaries included.29 Missionaries were to perform their good work “with gentle and divine words, and with examples and works of saintly life.”30 He was convinced that the natives could be made part of Christian civilization through persistent and sincere effort, and that enslavement or other coercion would be both unjust and counterproductive. Only peaceful interaction would ensure sincerity of heart among those who chose to convert.
Between writing, preaching, and political agitation, Las Casas devoted half a century to his labors on behalf of the natives, seeking reforms in their treatment and agitating against the encomienda system open to so much abuse. It was here that Las Casas identified an important source of injustice in the Spaniards’ behavior in the New World. An encomendero was assigned a group of Indians; it was his job to protect them and to provide them with religious education. The natives on his encomienda were expected to pay tribute to the encomendero in return. The encomienda did not originally amount to a grant of political sovereignty over the natives, but in practice it often amounted to that, and the requisite tribute was exacted all too often by forced labor. Having once possessed an encomienda himself, Las Casas knew the injustices and abuses of the system firsthand and worked with limited success to put a stop to what he considered a grave evil.
In 1564, reflecting on his decades of labor as an advocate for the natives, Las Casas wrote in his will:
In His goodness and mercy, God considered it right to choose me as his minister, though unworthy, to plead for all those peoples of the Indies, possessors of those kingdoms and lands, against wrongs and injuries never before heard of or seen, received from our Spaniards . . . and to restore them to the primitive liberty of which they were unjustly deprived. . . . And I have labored in the court of the kings of Castile going and coming many times from the Indies to Castile and from Castile to the Indies, for about fifty years, since the year 1514, for God alone and from compassion at seeing perish such multitudes of rational men, domestic, humble, most mild and simple beings, well fitted to receive our Catholic faith . . . and to be endowed with all good customs.31
To this day, Las Casas is considered almost a saint throughout much of Latin America, and he continues to be admired both for his courage and for his painstaking labor. His Catholic faith, which taught him that a single code of morality bound all men, permitted him to render judgment on the behavior of his own society in a spirit of strict impartiality—no small thing. Las Casas’s arguments, writes professor Lewis Hanke, “strengthened the hands of all those who in his time and the centuries to follow worked in the belief that all the peoples of the world are human beings with the potentialities and responsibilities of men.”32
Thus far we have spoken of the early development of international law, a norm governing the behavior of states toward each other. The difficulty of enforcing international law is a separate matter. The resolution of this problem is left more or less open in the work of the Spanish theologians.33 Vitoria’s answer appears to have been connected to the idea of just war—that is, if a state had violated the norms of international law in its interaction with another state, the latter state could have grounds for waging a just war against it.34
We should not carelessly assume that the Spanish theologians would have supported an institution akin to the United Nations. Recall the original problem that a system of international law aims to solve. According to the seventeenth-century British philosopher Thomas Hobbes, human society, without a government capable of functioning as an umpire over all men, is condemned to a state of chaos and civil war. The creation of a sovereign office whose primary function is to keep order and enforce obedience to the law is, in Hobbes’s view, the only mechanism by which we may escape the chronic insecurity and disorder of the so-called state of nature. In the same vein, it is sometimes said that in the absence of some kind of world government, the nations of the world are in the same situation vis-à-vis each other as are the individuals of a single nation before the creation of a government over them. Without the establishment of a sovereign to rule over the nations, Hobbesian analysis tells us that we can expect the same kind of conflict and disorder between nations as would exist, in the absence of civil government, between individual citizens.
The establishment of government does not solve the problem that Hobbes describes; it merely shifts that problem to another level. Government can enforce peace and prevent injustice among the people it rules. But the people are now in a state of nature vis-à-vis government itself, since there is no common umpire that stands above both government and people. If the government possesses the sovereign authority that Hobbes recommends, it must have the last word on the extent of its own powers, on right and wrong, and even on the adjudication of disputes between individual citizens and itself. Even if Hobbes believed in democracy, mere voting can hardly be expected to restrain such an institution. If a power above both government and people were established in order to ensure that government did not abuse its powers, it would only push the problem to yet another level, for there would now be no authority above this new power.
This is just one problem with the idea of an international institution with coercive powers to enforce international law. Proponents of this idea contend that such an authority would liberate the nations of the world from the Hobbesian state of nature in which they find themselves. But with the creation of such an authority, the problem of insecurity still exists: the nations of the world would then be in a state of nature vis-à-vis this new authority, whose behavior they would be unable to restrain.
The enforcement of international law, therefore, is no simple matter, and the establishment of a global institution for the purpose only shifts the Hobbesian problem rather than solving it. Yet other options remain. After all, advanced nations managed to observe the rules of so-called civilized warfare for two centuries following the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648). The threat of ostracism can have very real effects.
Whatever the practical difficulties of its enforcement, however, the idea of international law, which emerged in inchoate form as a result of the philosophical discussion prompted by the discovery of America, is supremely important. It suggests that each nation is not a moral universe unto itself, but is bound in its behavior by basic principles on which civilized peoples can agree. The state, in other words, is not morally autonomous.
In the early sixteenth century, Nicolo Machiavelli presaged the arrival of the modern state with his short book The Prince (1513). For Machiavelli, the state was indeed a morally autonomous institution whose behavior on behalf of its own preservation could be judged against no external standard, whether the decrees of a pope or any code of moral principle. No wonder the Church condemned Machiavelli’s political philosophy so severely: it was precisely this view that the great Catholic theologians of Spain so emphatically denied. The state, according to them, could indeed be judged according to principles external to itself, and could not act on the basis of mere expedience or narrow advantage if moral principles were trampled in the process.
In sum, Spanish theologians of the sixteenth century held the behavior of their own civilization up to critical scrutiny and found it wanting. They proposed that in matters of natural right the other peoples of the world were their equals, and that the commonwealths of pagan peoples were entitled to the same treatment that the nations of Christian Europe accorded to one another. That Catholic priests gave Western civilization the philosophical tools with which to approach non-Western peoples in a spirit of equality is quite an extraordinary thing. If we consider the Age of Discovery in the light of sound historical judgment, we must conclude that the Spaniards’ ability to look objectively at these foreign peoples and recognize their common humanity was no small accomplishment, particularly when measured against the parochialism that has so often colored one people’s conception of another.
Such impartiality could not have been expected to develop out of American Indian cultures. “The Indians of the same region or language group did not even have a common name for themselves,” explains Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison. “Each tribe called itself something like ‘We, the People,’ and referred to its neighbors by a word that meant ‘the Barbarians,’ ‘Sons of She-Dog,’ or something equally insulting.”35 That a counterexample like the Iroquois Confederation comes so readily to mind is an indication of its exceptional character. The conception of an international order of states large and small, of varying levels of civilization and refinement, operating on a principle of equality, could not have found fertile soil amid such narrow chauvinism. The Catholic conception of the fundamental unity of the human race, on the other hand, informed the deliberations of the great sixteenth-century Spanish theologians who insisted on universal principles that must govern the interaction of states. If we criticize Spanish excesses in the New World, therefore, it is thanks to the moral tools provided by the Catholic theologians of Spain itself that we are able to do so.
Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa put European interaction with the natives of the New World into similar perspective:
Father Las Casas was the most active, although not the only one, of those nonconformists who rebelled against abuses inflicted upon the Indians. They fought against their fellow men and against the policies of their own country in the name of the moral principle that to them was higher than any principle of nation or state. This self-determination could not have been possible among the Incas or any of the other pre-Hispanic cultures. In these cultures, as in the other great civilizations of history foreign to the West, the individual could not morally question the social organism of which he was a part, because he existed only as an integral atom of that organism and because for him the dictates of the state could not be separated from morality. The first culture to interrogate and question itself, the first to break up the masses into individual beings who with time gradually gained the right to think and act for themselves, was to become, thanks to that unknown exercise, freedom, the most powerful civilization of our world.36
That injustices were committed in the conquest of the New World no serious person will deny, and priests at the time chronicled and condemned them. But it is natural that we should wish to find some silver lining, some mitigating factor, amid the demographic tragedy that struck the peoples of the New World during the Age of Discovery. And that silver lining was that the encounters between these peoples provided an especially opportune moment for moralists to discuss and develop the fundamental principles that must govern their interaction. In this task they were aided enormously by the painstaking moral analysis of Catholic theologians teaching in Spanish universities.37 As Hanke rightly concludes, “The ideals which some Spaniards sought to put into practice as they opened up the New World will never lose their shining brightness as long as men believe that other peoples have a right to live, that just methods may be found for the conduct of relations between peoples, and that essentially all the peoples of the world are men.”38 These are ideas with which the West has identified for centuries, and they come to us directly from the best of Catholic thought. Thus do we have another pillar of Western civilization constructed by the Catholic Church.