He wanted deeply to believe in the elemental goodness of the world in which he lived—he had largely put the conquest behind him, and was moving matter-of-factly toward the future—but on that day, when he had witnessed an atrocity committed in the name of the law, the name of the king, and the name of God, he had no choice but to doubt the justice of the laws as well as the morality of the men who enforced them. He made no impassioned statements, but in his writings he subtly made it clear to posterity that there was a limit to the moral authority he would accord the Europeans who ruled his
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