RELATIONS OF AMERICAN HISTORY 179 



throughout Western Europe. Who can affirm that religious liberty 

 with its enormous increment to ordinary human happiness could 

 have been attained even in the twentieth century, without the lesson 

 of the experiments in Maryland and Rhode Island, the Carolinasj the 

 Jerseys, New York and Pennsylvania? 



Still again, in America the theories of Locke seemed to explain 

 the facts of society, and became the people's political creed. In- 

 corporated in the Declaration of Independence and the State Bills 

 of Rights, these principles exerted an infinitely greater force upon 

 France, and through France upon Euro) >> and South America, than 

 could by any possibility have flowed dii- ctly from the Two Essays 

 on Government. It is needless here to expatiate upon so familiar 

 a topic as the rise of democracy in America and its diffusion from 

 these shores, or upon the development of w r ritten constitutions and 

 their spread over the world, after the most interesting contributions 

 of Borgeaud to those subjects. 



Passing now to my concluding thought, I shall try to point out 

 certain advantages to be derived from a more adequate study of the 

 history of Spanish America. 



Our colonial history in the past has too rarely emerged from a 

 narrow provincialism, and even now it often tends to sink to ancestor 

 worship. If a departure was made from the narrow track of colonial 

 annals, it generally consisted in conventional comments on the 

 Spanish cruelties and thirst for gold and the superior wisdom and 

 natural capacity of the English race for colonization, with little 

 or no attempt at discriminating comparison between the two types of 

 colonial enterprise. 



More broadly conceived, the study of the European colonization 

 of America becomes the investigation of one of the great instances 

 of the transmission of culture in human history, that process by 

 which the social, intellectual, and religious acquisitions of one people 

 are transmitted or imposed upon another, which is thereby lifted to 

 a higher stage of civilization. The conquests of Alexander spread 

 Greek culture far beyond the boundaries of Greek colonization; 

 through the expansion of Rome the science of Greece, the jurisprud- 

 ence of Rome, and the Christian religion became the common 

 possession of the ancient world; through the Norman conquest 

 England was brought into intimate political and social relations 

 with the Continent and shared more fully the heritage of Rome. 

 At the time of the Renaissance Italy was the teacher of Europe in 

 literature, art, politics, and manners; and the vivifying influences 

 flowing from that country fertilized the intellectual soil of Germany, 

 France, and England. During the reign of Louis XIV, France, in 

 turn, became the arbiter of manners and set the fashion for literary 

 and artistic effort. In the early eighteenth century the stream set in 



