That discovery was effected by a man belonging to a people who were no longer a nation, who had already fallen into apparently irretrievable decay, whose feeble life was sustained by the mouldering remnants of past greatness, and who had at that time neither the ambition nor the capacity to found new colonies or to play a new part in the drama of the world. Italy was then in fact what Metternich in later years cynically declared it to be, "a geographical expression," and little more. Columbus was, it is true, also the representative and agent of another but kindred people, who did form a nation and a power, and that nation was then seemingly in the ascendant. But it had already implanted within itself the fatal elements of sure and swift decline. It was a power then, and for a century more, mighty for conquest, but inapt and impotent for effective colonization. The result was that when Columbus "found a new world for Leon and Castile" he gained for that kingdom something with which the latter was incompetent to deal. By virtue of his adventures Spain might claim ownership of the whole western hemisphere. But what would she, what could she, do with it? History soon began to give its inexorable answer to that question. Spain was able to conquer, but not to hold; to spoil, but not to cultivate. Through sheer inability to occupy all her newfound world, she was compelled to share it with other and rival powers. For herself she managed industrial colonies and marts of commerce, and was creating a new England wherever the Cross of Saint George was planted. The difference was shown also in the attitude of the three peoples toward the natives of America. The Spanish were capricious. In some places they exterminated them, in some they enslaved them, in some they intermarried with them and formed a mongrel race, and in some they did all three together. The French generally tolerated them, with a goodhumored patronage, and in not a few cases also practised miscegenation. But there was little variety and no uncertainty in the conduct of the English. They held themselves sternly aloof from the natives with an unconquerable pride of race, driving them ever from the land and taking it all for themselves. Each of the three powers was animated by a spirit of expansion and of conquest. But the spirits were radically different, and that of England was the one which, by the very force of natural necessity, was predestined ultimately to prevail. Nor were those the only differences. There was a geographical one, too, not less worthy of consideration and not less potent in determining the course of empire. It has long been a truism that John Lackland's sacrifice of England's continental provinces was a blessing in disguise. It made the English nation insular, which means not only that the English became restricted in their views and |