OCEAN, THE UNIVERSAL HIGHWAY 229 



boldly sailed in the Spaniards' tracks, and demanded 

 a share in the gains of their discoveries. It was 

 entirely outside morality, business or otherwise ; it 

 could not be called war, since the two nations were 

 ostensibly at peace ; and it was not frankly piratical, 

 being justified by the aggressors on religious grounds. 

 I have called the English "aggressors," although the 

 term seems rather far-fetched, remembering the enor- 

 mous disproportion between the two countries in 

 favour of Spain. But I -think the term is correct ; 

 we were the aggressors, whatever justification for our 

 aggression we might have put forward. 



Still, it was an unmoral age. The rules of conduct 

 which govern us to-day, not perfectly, but to a very 

 great extent, were then extant but entirely ignored, 

 and men of all the nominally Christian nations did 

 things without a qualm that we to-day should cha- 

 racterize as the blackest of crimes, and turned from 

 the commission of those acts to the performance of 

 religious duties with an air of perfect innocence. 

 Even then, so queerly constituted is the human mind, 

 men made excuses for their deeds, found all sorts 

 of strange justifications for them, so that even the 

 horrible slave trade was carried on by Englishmen 

 with as little compunction as if they had been rovers 

 of Sallee. And in this spirit the English sea-rovers 

 began the informal war with Spain by following in 

 the tracks of her argosies, noting the ports to which 

 they sailed, lying in wait for them when return- 

 ing laden with spoil, and conscientiously robbing 

 the robbers for the Spaniards were nothing better 

 than robbers and murderers of the very worst type, 

 albeit they committed their crimes with a high-bred 



