|
|
Torquenado Directory 09
Page 07
It is upon this basis that all previous discussions of law for regulating warfare have proceeded. The German submarine fulfills none of these obligations. She enjoys no local command of the waters wherein she operates. She does not take her captures within the jurisdiction of a prize court. She carries no prize crew which can be put aboard prizes which she seizes. She uses no effective means of discriminating between neutral and enemy vessels. She does not receive on board for safety the crew of the vessel she sinks. Her methods of warfare, therefore, are entirely outside the scope of any international instruments regulating operations against commerce in time of war.
Moreover, the Spaniards found their first American conquests too easy, and the rewards of these too great. This prevented all thought of developing the country through industry, concentrating expectation solely upon waiting fortunes, to be had from the natives by the sword or through forced labor in mines, Their treatment of the aborigines was nothing short of diabolical. Well has it been said: "The Spaniards had sown desolation, havoc, and misery in and around their track. They had depopulated some of the best peopled of the islands and renewed them with victims deported from others. They had inflicted upon hundreds of thousands of the natives all the forms and agonies of fiendish cruelty, driving them to self-starvation and suicide, as a way of mercy and release from an utterly wretched existence. They had come to be viewed by their victims as fiends of hate, malignity, and all dark and cruel desperation and mercilessness in passion. The hell which they denounced upon their victims was shorn of its worst terror by the assurance that these tormentors were not to be there. Las Casas, the noble missionary, the true soldier of the cross, and the few priests and monks who sympathized with him, in vain protested against these cruelties."
|
