392 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



recruits, stopped supplies and sequestered the property" Cortez sent to 

 Spain. The conqueror bitterly complained that he "had found it 

 harder to contend against his own countrymen than against the Aztecs." 

 The story of Spain's South American colonies is one of injustice, 

 oppression and downright robbery. The natives naturally suffered 

 most. They were condemned to forced labor in the mines under cir- 

 cumstances of extreme barbarity, in order that large sums of money 

 might be sent annually to Spain. This insatiable demand neutralized 

 all the efforts of the best-intentioned viceroys and rendered all attempts 

 at good government nugatory. The Indians had further to submit to 

 grinding oppression by the local officials and to the exactions and 

 tyranny of the priests. The Spanish colonists had their own grievances. 

 Articles of commerce were excluded, or had their prices heightened by 

 the monopoly of the Cadiz merchants. They were oppressed by the 

 military despotism of the government. The political development of 

 the colonies was made impossible by the continued use of them for the 

 purposes of the mother country. What Spain was for three centuries, 

 that was she till the other day in her few remaining colonies. Lord 

 Brassey writes of Cuba: "The casual visitor can not fail to be im- 

 pressed with the evidences of inefficient administration. The fiscal 

 policy is intensely exclusive. The taxation is heavy, and the govern- 

 ment absolutely despotic. The police maintain a system of intolerable 

 espionage. Every salaried servant of the local government is a Span- 

 iard, who regards Cuba as a vassal state, over which Spain has unlimited 

 rights, without reciprocal duties or obligations. The system has 

 already severed all her noble settlements in South America from the 

 mother country. In time it must involve the loss of Cuba." 



If it were the case that the genesis and growth of the myriad buds 

 formed round a prolific hydroid were accelerated by magnetic shoots (so 

 to speak) from the parent zoophyte, and 'persons' were thus differ- 

 entiated, we should have a true analogue to a kind of action exercised 

 by the mother country on its colonies. For it long supplies them with 

 the greater part of their brain power, governing force, culture, science 

 and experience of all sorts, and when these have done their work a new 

 political, intellectual and moral center is created, which is henceforth 

 self-subsistent; the colony has received a soul, a mind, a heart. First, 

 the governor is usually sent out by the metropolis. Of six hundred and 

 seventy-two rulers of South America, from its conquest to its independ- 

 ence, only eighteen were Americans. In French and Dutch colonies 

 there are possibly no exceptions. Many of the charter and proprietary 

 colonies of North America elected their own governors, and the insurrec- 

 tionary governor of a Crown colony, New York, was popularly elected. 

 The lieutenant-governors of the provinces of the Canadian Domin- 

 ion are locally appointed. With these and one or two other exceptions, 



