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Updated: May 25, 2025
Montesino promised soon to preach in another style. Having filled the church with his malignant audience, he bravely maintained his position with fresh facts and arguments; he showed that the system of repartimientos, or partition of the Indians among the colonists, was more disastrous than the first system, which imposed upon each cacique a tax and left him to extort it from his subjects.
However, this accomplished nothing, as neither Father Montesino, the Prior of the little community, nor any of the brotherhood was at all moved by their threats, and all they obtained from the Dominicans was an agreement that Father Montesino should preach again the next Sunday and endeavor to please his congregation as far as his conscience would permit.
The committee told everybody that the Father was going to retract, and again the next Sunday the church was crowded to hear Montesino eat his own words. But, instead of the humble apology that was expected, his auditors received a more terrible rebuke than before, Montesino threatening them with eternal torments if they continued to illtreat the Indians, or engage in the slave trade.
Of course every one was curious to hear what would be said, and when Sunday came the church was crowded. There was the governor, Diego Columbus, in his pew, with his wife, a grand-niece of King Ferdinand, and there were the officers of the colony, all the prominent citizens, in fact, everybody in the town. Father Montesino preached from the text: I am "the voice of one crying in the wilderness."
As soon as they arrived in Seville, Montesino introduced Las Casas to the good bishop of Seville, who did all he could to help him, giving him a letter to the King and to others of the court that might in all probability be interested. It would be too long a story to tell, the chronicle of all that Las Casas went through in his struggles to right the wrongs of the Indians.
The discussion which Montesino raised went home to Spain; but when a board of commissioners, charged to investigate the subject, advised that all Indians granted to Spanish courtiers, and to all other persons who did not reside upon the island, should be set at liberty, the colonists saw the entering wedge of emancipation.
The Dominicans were very poor and had never been able to finish their humble monastery building, so they sent Father Montesino, who had preached the famous sermon against slavery the year after their coming to Hispaniola, with Las Casas to Spain, that he might try to raise the money needed; and in 1515 they sailed.
So they fasted and prayed, and conferred together, and finally decided that one of their number, Father Antonio Montesino, should preach a sermon on the subject.
Montesino, a Dominican preacher, attacked the cruelty of the colonists from the pulpit of San Domingo. He was accused of treason; that is to say, the king was held to represent the policy which enslaved and destroyed the Indian. The authorities threatened to expel the Dominicans from the island, if the preacher did not apologize and withdraw his charges.
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