RELATIONS OF AMERICAN HISTORY 177 



Other ways in which in American history the processes of the re- 

 mote past have been reproduced can be studied in the history of 

 Spanish America, where the conquest of organized societies by alien 

 invaders and the bringing in of a new civilization help us to visu- 

 alize the process by which Africa became Roman or Syria Greek. 

 Still again the Spanish missions, which from California to Paraguay 

 pushed out among the wild Indians and prepared them for civilized 

 life, will help us to see more clearly the processes by which Christ- 

 ianity made its way slowly into the recesses of Germanic and Sla- 

 vonic heathenism. 



There is still another way in which the American colonial com- 

 munities offer instruction to the student of European history. By 

 their detachment from the main currents of progress they formed, 

 as it were, eddies in which were preserved, still in vigorous life, much 

 that had quite disappeared in more progressive centres, and in this 

 respect they may be said to serve as a kind of historical museum. 



The rigorous sifting of emigration from Spain and its prohibition 

 from other countries, coupled with a close censorship of the press, 

 preserved in Spanish America relatively undisturbed the thought, 

 the life, and the manners of Spain just as she emerged from the 

 Middle Ages. Nearly forty years after Luther posted his theses the 

 name Lutheran conveyed no meaning to the people of Mexico. The 

 first auto da fe in that city in 1556 aroused the greatest curiosity, 

 and the English merchant Tomson reported that "there were that 

 came one hundredth mile off, to see the said Auto (as they call it), 

 for that there were never none before, that had done the like in the 

 said country, nor could not tell what Lutherans were, nor what it 

 meant; for that they never heard of any such thing before." * The 

 effects of a similar policy survive to the present day in French 

 Canada, where one can still observe the piety of pre-Reformation 

 Europe. 



In like manner, Puritanism dominated New England over a cen- 

 tury after its sway was broken in the mother country. The English 

 traveler who came to Boston in 1692 not only crossed the Atlantic 

 but he went back in time a half a century. Such a tragedy as the 

 witchcraft trials would have been impossible in England in 1692, 

 although in perfect accord with the spirit and beliefs of the time 

 of the Long Parliament and the Commonwealth. In fact, the good 

 and evil of English Puritanism are nowhere so marked as in New 

 England. There it was segregated, dominant, and lived out its life. 



I proposed as the third subdivision of my subject to indicate some 

 of the ways in which America has affected European life by reaction. 



moires de I'Institut National des Sciences el Arts: Sciences Morales el Politiques, 

 Paris, An vn, t. n, p. 100. 



1 Hakluyt, Voyages (Goldsmid's ed.), xiv, 146. 



