CHAPTER XII

THE PASSING OF SPAIN

GREAT were Babylon and Carthage and Egypt and Rome, but they have all passed away. Great was Spain; but alas! she is passing. China they say is doomed; so is Spain. Little consolation in that for either Spain or China. So young to die! is Spain; only two thousand years old, while China is four thousand. We are all doomed; inexorable is fate. Where will be the United States four thousand years hence, when the New Pacific is as old as is now the Mediterranean?

Nations must die, and Spain and China are sick unto death. Old age comes on apace, showing disorganization and decay, internal corruption and external infection, the air pestilential from their presence. Young nations take their place, the strong becoming stronger and the weak weaker, until the young become old and their death too is demanded. All the nations round the Pacific are young, all save poor old China, and her the powers propose to rejuvenate by processes of strangulation and limb-tearing, making her quickly to die that the more quickly she may be born again. Our war with Spain was but part of that irrepressible conflict ever in force between advancing youth and departing age.

I do not purpose in this chapter to recite the woes and wickedness of Spain, because, first, a volume would not contain them, and secondly we have all made our little slips in life, which we see no use in constantly raking up; we, even we of these American states, innocent and unsophisticated as we are, have to blush for some few little sins of our own, such as burning witches, hanging quakers, exterminating Indians, and giving Africans the ballot. These, however, are but the small follies of childhood, gone and forgotten, all but the one last named, which I fear will hang as a black cloud over the

destinies of this republic for many a day. "Ah, well!" says Sancho, "We are all as God made us, only a little worse."

Having confessed ourselves we may now confess Spain. What are her sins? Folly, first, and second, and folly last. But are God's fools to be blamed or pitied? Well, then, pity Spain, and pass her on. Fools are not pleasant things to have around, that is when the folly is offensive, which means when it differs from our own folly. Though we hanged a poor quaker or two, we never robbed and burned 100,000 Jews at one time, or drove out to desolation five times as many Moors after promising them protection; but then we are so very young, we may do something great yet before we die.

Spain is passing, and she deserves to pass. It is the best for all, for herself and others. Let all good people stand aside and give her room. Her days of usefulness are over. We thought the Pizarros of the conquest bad enough, but the Weylers of the reconcentrados are worse. She is rushing headlong to destruction down a descent so steep that she never can recover herself. Her Spanish honor has become so black and dastardly a thing that it can sit and smile on such high achievements as the Maine infamy, the starving of thousands of innocent country people, and the cruelties at the Philippines, surpassing those of any Inquisition, for the Weyler was there also.

The time of which Campanella wrote when the world looked to Spain as universal lord and dominator has long since passed away, never to return. Old age has come, hastened by ignorance, egotism, and superstition. Spain lost her colonies in attempting to fasten on them her own industrial fanaticism, and the diseases of the mother still infect the blood of the daughter-countries.

What is the cause of Spain's degeneracy, after running her brief and sometime brilliant course of a thousand or two years? In answer I might ask what causes the decay and death of any nation, of all the nations, one after another, each in turn? First it is the law. Secondly, the administration of the law, as displayed in the deeds of the insane Nebuchadnezzars before they are turned out to grass. Thirdly, the luxury and licentiousness of the people. It is all very simple, though wonderful, as simple and wonderful as the shooting up and dying down of a blade of grass, for so

come and go nations as well as individuals. So long as Spain had honest work to do, and did it-for I suppose as the world has been going that the wars of Christians and Mohammedans may be called honest work,-as long as she was fighting her Moors, some 800 years or so, she grew in strength and greatness. Then came Columbus, even to the walls of Granada, and as the last of the Saracens were passing out he handed in his New World. And that made all the difference. This clearing the Peninsula of infidels gave all the soil to christianity, and it took root and flourished, and is there to this day. But the Moors were better men than the Spaniards, though like the Chinese in California they had to go; they were better men as wealth-producers, not as New World robbers; better artisans and architects, better workers and better subjects, or citizens. They were more moral, more intelligent, more liberal-minded, more tolerant in religious matters. These are not mere random remarks; the statement will bear the closest scrutiny of the student. The Moors had in themselves and their religion their own elements of decay, but their disease was not the disease of Spain. Her trouble was the glory and greatness resulting from her long wars, followed by the wealth of the Indies which quickly flowed in, all blown into a brilliant bubble by those very able princes from Holland, father and son, and attended on the part of the people by cessation from work, and that idleness, luxurious living, and overweening indulgence which lead to degeneracy, and which breed bigotry and egotism, moral and political corruption, and an ignoble end.

All this we shall surely come to some day ourselves, unless God changes or the world changes; but when will it be? Shall we die young like Spain, or live to be old and respectable like China, to be finally looted and partitioned by the combined powers of the North Pole?

Look at Spain at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Her merchant marine was the finest in the world, numbering over 1,000 vessels. A new world with a wilderness of new wealth had just dropped into her lap as from the skies. The quays of Cádiz and Seville were groaning under the burden of a new commerce. Her manufactures were ample to supply not only home requirements but the necessities of all her colonists. Cloth and coral work were produced at Barcelona,

the rival of Venice; silk and groceries at Valencia; cloth at Cuenca and Huete; swords and muskets at Toledo; silk paper and flaxen goods at Granada; cloth again at Ciudadreal, Segovia, and Villacastin; steel blades at Albacete; soap and groceries at Yepes and Ocaña; hats and saddles at Córdova; linen in Galicia; and cutlery and plate at Valladolid. Some of these cities employed 3,000 workmen. Husbandry was conducted by the Moriscos under the best methods then known. By systems of irrigation the soil was made to yield large returns in rice, cotton, sugar, and other products. The church was all-dominant; thousands of students flocked to the universities; the monarchs of Spain were the mightiest of the earth.

Toward the close of the following century look again that way. An imbecile on the throne once occupied by the crafty Charles and Philip. Society rotten to the core. Soil exhausted and running to waste; factories closed; artisan and agriculturist vanished, one million of the best of them, the Moriscos, cut off at a single blow; the domain of proud Castile dismembered, Holland and Portugal gone, Artois, Roussillon, and Franche Comte, the glory of the kingdom departed. And after another century, how then? Humiliated into the dust; beaten in war like a child; not a foot of land in America, money gone, reputation gone, "all lost but honor", and that so filthy and tattered a thing that no one will touch it.

That Spain is as fit an object for dismemberment and partition among the powers as China is becoming every day more clear. The same arguments will apply with equal force in one case as in the other. Spain is European and Christian; China is Asiatic and Confucian. Spain is retrograding; China is stationary or slightly progressive. China has long been in some degree civilized, and may be taught to advance; Spain has attained her full stature in greatness, and is now seized with inevitable decay and death. There is hope for China; there is none whatever for Spain. As well attempt to resuscitate Assyria or ancient Greece.

This late war with the United States was the logical conclusion of preceding events. Adventurers of the Latin race and Anglo-saxons had each their separate way to reach America and the nineteenth century, and these ways made some

what different beings of them. Both enjoyed the same civilization and professed fundamentally the same religion; but their refinement and their religion were of different qualities. Both were crude enough in the one and fanatical enough in the other, but there was always less of sturdy effort and sturdy honesty in men of the Latin race than in the Anglo-saxons. The clouds of superstition appeared not quite so dense over England as over Spain, where inquisitions and autos-da-fé so long held sway. Hence when the two races met in conflict in the New World as they had met many times in the Old, the fittest remained. France retired after the struggle at Quebec; Spain relinquished Florida and Louisiana, then all her mainland possessions in both Americas, and finally her islands. Meanwhile the two races had been drifting yet further apart, one giving itself up to vanity and luxury, with much untruthfulness and hypocrisy, while the other with thrifty application strove for the higher purposes of integrity and advancement.

More than a hundred years ago Voltaire thus satirized Spanish methods, which were strikingly like the bombast and falsehoods employed to-day. "When we were informed. that the same savages who came through the air to seize on Gibraltar were come to besiege our beautiful Barcelona," Dona las Nalgas said, "we began to offer prayers at Notre Dame Manrozo-assuredly the best mode of defence. The people, who came from so far, are called by a name very hard to pronounce, that is English. Our reverend father inquisitor, Don Jeronimo Bueno Caracucarador, preached against these brigands. He anathematized them in Notre Dame d'Elpino. He assured us that the English had monkey-tails, bears' paws, and parrot-heads; that they sometimes spoke like men, but invariably made a great hissing; that they were morcover notorious heretics; that though the blessed virgin was often indulgent to poor sinners, she never forgave heretics, and that consequently they would all be infallibly exterminated, especially if they presumed to appear before Mont-Joui. He had scarcely finished his sermon when he heard that MontJoui was taken by storm."

How different the influence of Anglo-America on England, and of Spanish-America on Spain! The former gave to the mother country the lessons it had learned in democracy,