HELPS, SIR ARTHUR, an English essayist and historian, born at Streatham, Surrey, July 10, 1813; died in London, March 7, 1875. He was the son of an English merchant; was educated at Eton and at Cambridge. In 1835 he published Thoughts in the Cloister and the Crowd. On leaving the University he became private secretary to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and in 1840-41 was secretary to Lord Morpeth in Ireland. After this he had no official post until 1860, when he was appointed Clerk of the Privy Council, an office which he retained during his life. He was the author of Essays Written in the Intervals of Business (1841), two plays, Henry the Second, and Catherine Douglas (1843); The Claims of Labor, an Essay on the Duties of the Employers to the Employed (1844); Friends in Council, a Series of Readings and Discourses thereon (1847-51); Companions of My Soli tude (1851); The Conquerors of the New World and their Bondsmen (1848-52); The Spanish Conquest of America (1855, 1857 and 1861); Culita the Serf, a tragedy (1858); Friends in Council, Second Series (1859); Organization in Daily Life (1862); The Life of Las Casas, the Apostle to the Indians (1868); Life of Columbus, Life of Pizarro, and Realmah (1869); Casimir Maremma (1870); Brevia, short Essays and Aphorisms, Conversations on War and General Culture, and Life of Hernando Cortes (1871); Thoughts on Government, and The Life and Labor of Sir

Thomas Brassey (1872); Talks About Animals and their Masters (1873); Ivan de Biron (1874) and Social Pressure (1875).

Helps is best known by his social essays and by his histories of the Spanish conquest of America. Ruskin says: "A true thinker, who has practical purpose in his thinking, and is sincere, as Plato, or Carlyle, or Helps, becomes in some sort a seer, and must be always of infinite use to his generation."

UNEXPECTED OPPORTUNITY.

Once this happened to me, that a great fierce obdurate crowd were pushing up in long line toward a door which was to lead them to some good thing; and I, not liking the crowd, stole out of it, having made up my mind to be last, and was leaning indolently against a closed-up side door; when, all of a sudden, this door opened, and I was the first to walk in, and saw arrive long after me, the men who had been thrusting and struggling round me.-This does not often happen in the world, but I think there was a meaning in it.—Companions of my Solitude.

THE PRIVILEGE OF DOING A KINDNESS.

It is a great privilege to have an opportunity many times in a day, in the course of your business, to do a real kindness which is not to be paid for. Graciousness of demeanor is a large part of the duty of any official person who comes in contact with the world. Where a man's business is, there is the ground for his religion to manifest itself.-Companions of my Solitude.

THE SPANISH ENCOMIENDA SYSTEM.

The history of encomiendas is, perhaps, the largest branch of the greatest public cause the world has yet seen. It is a misfortune that, with the exception of one Italian gentleman, Benzoni, we have no instance of an independent traveller going to the New World, and

making his remarks upon the state of society in it. But if there had been such travellers, the aspects which the conquered country would have presented to them would have been very various and very difficult to understand. They would have seen some Indians with marks in their faces toiling at the mines, while other Indians, unbranded, and perhaps with their wives, were also engaged in the same unwelcome toil. They would have noticed some Indians at work in domestic offices in and about the Spanish houses; other Indians employed in erecting public buildings and monasteries; others working, in their rude, primitive way, upon their own plantations; others occupied in the new employment, to them, of tending cattle brought from Spain; others engaged in manufactories of silk and cotton; others reckoning with king's officers, and involved in all the intricacies of minute accounts. Everywhere, on all roads, tracks, and by-paths, they would have seen Indians carrying burdens; and these travellers must have noticed the extraordinary fact that an activity in commerce, war, and public works, greater perhaps than that of Europe at the same time, was dependent, as regards transport, upon men instead of beasts of burden. Such a state of things the world had never seen before.

These

Then across the path of these travellers would have moved a small, stern-looking body of Spaniards, fully armed, and followed by more thousands of Indians than the men in armor numbered hundreds-probably five thousand Indians and three hundred Spaniards. were about to make what they call entrada into some unknown or half-known adjacent country. If the travellers, without attracting the notice of the conquerors, could have gained the opportunity of speaking a few words with any of the Indians engaged in these various ways, they would soon have heard narratives varying in a hundred particulars, but uniform in one respect, namely, that the Indians were all unwillingly engaged in working for alien masters.

I cannot better begin this very difficult and complicated subject, which, however, if once understood, will reward all the attention it requires, than by giving a precise definition, according to the best Spanish legists, of what an encomienda was. It was "a right conceded

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by royal bounty to well-deserving persons in the Indies, to receive and enjoy for themselves the tributes of the Indians who should be assigned to them, with a charge of providing for the good of those Indians in spiritual and temporal matters, and of inhabiting and defending the provinces where these encomiendas should be granted to them. The first thing that will strike the careful reader is that the foregoing definition of encomienda will by no means justify or account for the various kinds of forced service which I picture those travellers to have seen who might have visited the Spanish Indies within the first fifty years after their conquest. But this apparent discrepancy may be easily explained. These encomiendas were not given, theoretically at least, until after the complete conquest of the province in which they were given. During the time of war those Indians who were made prisoners were considered slaves, and were called Indios de guerra, just the same as when the Spaniards made war upon the Moors of Barbary, the slaves, in that case, being called Berberiscos.

Then there were the ransomed slaves, Indios de Rescate, as they were called, who, being originally slaves in their own tribe, were delivered by the cacique of that tribe or by other Indians, in lieu of tribute. Upon this it must be remarked that the word slave meant a very different thing in Indian language from what it did in Spanish language, and certainly did not exceed in signification the word vassal. A slave in an Indian tribe, as Las Casas remarks, possessed his house, his hearth, his private property, his farm, his wife, his children, and his liberty, except when at certain stated times his lord had need of him to build his house, or labor upon a field, or do other similar things which occurred at stated intervals. This statement is borne out by a letter addressed to the Emperor from the auditors of Mexico, in which they say that, "granted that among the Indians there were slaves, the one servitude is very different from the other. The Indians treated their slaves as relations and vassals, the Christians as dogs." The Audiencia proceed to remark that slaves were wont to succeed their masters in their seignories, and they illustrate this by saying that at the time of the Conquest it was a slave who governed that part of the

citadel which is called Temixtitan. Moreover, such confidence was placed in this man, that Cortez himself gave him the same government after the death of King Quauhtemozin. The auditors conclude by saying, "He is dead, and there is here a son of his who went with the marquis to kiss your majesty's hands."

The causes for which these men were made slaves in their own tribes were of the most trivial nature, and such as would go some way to prove that slavery itself was light. In times of scarcity, a parent would sell a son or a daughter for two fanegas (three bushels) of maize. The slightest robbery was punished with slavery, and then, if the slave gave anything to his relatives from the house of his master, they were liable to be made slaves. In cases of non payment of debt, as in the Roman law, after a certain time the debtor became a slave. If a slave fled, the lord took the nearest kinsman of the fugitive for a slave, by which it seems that relationship in those countries had the inconveniences that it seems to have in China now. But the strangest and most ludicrous way in which a free Indian could become a slave was by losing at a game of ball, in which practised players inveigled their simple brethren, after the fashion of modern sharpers, showing rich things to be gained, and pretending that they themselves knew nothing of the game.

Referring again to what might have been seen by an observant person in the Indies at any time within fifty years after the Conquest, he would have been sure to notice certain bands of Indians who were more closely connected together than the slaves, either of ransom or of war, whose fate, up to the year 1542, we have just been tracing. After any conquest in the Indies that was not ferociously mismanaged (as was the case in the Terra-firma), the Indians remained in the pueblos or villages. There, according to the theory of encomiendas, quoted above, they were to live, paying tribute to their encomienderos, who theoretically stood in the place of the king, and were to receive this tribute from the Indians as from his vassals. But such a state of things would ill have suited with the requirements of the Spaniards. Money is the most convenient thing to receive in a civilized community; but in an infant colony, personal