Robinson Crusoe

It takes me a long time to read anything these days - never enough time. However, I have managed to complete Daniel Defoe's classic Robinson Crusoe. It's pivotal.

Anyhow, I have to share Robinson Crusoe's (Daniel Defoe's) tirade against the spanish. Not that I have anything to say against them - I'm sure you're all a lovely lot. But this certainly says something about the English-Spanish relationship in the early 1600's.

"That this would justify the conduct of the Spaniards in all their barbarities practised in America, and where they destroyed millions of these people; who, however they were in their customs, such as sacrificing human bodies to their idols, were yet, as to the Spaniards, very innocent people; and that the abhorrence and detestation by even the Spaniards themselves at this time, and by all other Christian nations of Europe, as a mere butchery, a bloody and unnatural piece of cruelty, unjustifiable either to God or man; and such, as for which the very name of a Spaniard is reckoned to be frightful and terrible to all people of humanity, or of Christian compassion; as if the kingdom of Spain were particularly eminent for the product of a race of men who were without principles of tenderness, or the common bowels of pity to the miserable, which is reckoned to be a mark of generous temper in the mind."

Well...