174 HISTORY OF AMERICA 



I am aware that these assertions will surprise some and perhaps 

 be dismissed by others as extravagant. I propose, however, to elab- 

 orate them somewhat, to bring home perhaps more effectively my 

 point of the essential oneness of American and Western European 

 history. 



What, in fact, did Spain attempt in the New World and what did 

 she accomplish? She undertook the magnificent if impossible task 

 of lifting a whole race numbering millions into the sphere of European 

 thought, life, and religion. Beside such an enterprise the continental 

 wars of Spain become struggles of transitory interest. But I am 

 reminded that she failed. Such is the ready verdict that is pro- 

 nounced in accordance with prevalent opinion. But even if the 

 attempt was in some degree a failure, it was a failure after the 

 fashion of the failure of Alexander the Great to establish a per- 

 manent Asiatic Empire, a failure that has left an ineffaceable 

 impress on succeeding ages. 



Yet the conception was grand, and the effort to realize it called 

 forth the best that was in the men who labored either consciously or 

 unconsciously for its accomplishment. Like all great events in human 

 history it has its dark sides, and unfortunately these dark sides, 

 through the influence of national jealousy and religious prejudice, 

 have commonly been thrust into the foreground by non-Spanish 

 writers. 



The great permanent fact remains, however, after all qualifica- 

 tions, that during the colonial period the language, the religion, the 

 culture, and the political institutions of Castile were transplanted 

 over an area twenty times as great as that of the parent state. That 

 this culture and religion seem to the English Protestant inferior to 

 his own is natural; but while that opinion accounts for some of the 

 prevalent disparagement of the work of Spain in America, its truth 

 or falsity is not relevant to the present question. The essential 

 point is that, outside of the fields of art and literature, the great 

 contributions that Spain made to human progress in the sixteenth 

 and seventeenth centuries were made in America. In such contri- 

 butions to the stock of knowledge as are derived from observation 

 in distinction from those obtained by speculative thought, she far 

 surpassed France and England. Immense additions to geography, 

 to linguistics, to anthropology, flowed from the activities of her 

 explorers and scholars. Nor were the additions to the national 

 literature that took their rise in the New World slight accessions 

 to the general body of literature informed with the spirit of heroic 

 action. The dispatches of Cortes, the True History of Bernal Diaz, 

 may fairly claim consideration beside Caesar's Commentaries. Nor 

 can one read the story of De Soto's march, as told by the Gentlemen 

 of Elvas or Rodrigo Ranjel in the pages of Oviedo, without continually 



