that it is of the utmost importance that the learned should deeply investigate the monuments of America. I think I foresee a time when these and similar researches, which are being undertaken in various parts of the world, will be made to converge to a far larger knowledge of the early records of this earth than has hitherto been obtained, and will thus assist in solving some of the most important questions which exist with respect to the early peopling of the world, the migration of races, and the capabilities of different races in enduring different climates." We must now glance briefly at the second important element in the conquest of America-the character of the conquerors themselves. In Europe generally, and in Protestant Europe especially, the Spaniard has been long regarded as the type of pride and hardness of heart. With the mercurial Frenchman he had few points in common, and their disagreement was aggravated by competition for empire. To the Italian he was a stern ruler; and although the common descendants of Philip and Jeanne la Folle occupied the palaces of Madrid and Vienna, the solita inter fratres odia, or at least the jealousies of rival crowns, were rife between them. By the Fleming and the Hollander the Castilian was regarded in the same light as the Jews regarded Antiochus Epiphanes, or the Christians of the second century Diocletian. Alba was with them the type of the Spanish nation, and the type also of an incarnate fiend. And among the English the Spanish national character has fared little better, since it is associated with Smithfield and the Armada, with all the crimes done in the Spanish main, and with all the cruelties and insolences committed in the wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Even the Peninsular war and its great results effected little towards removing these sinister prejudices; for in it the Spaniard had proved himself slothful, treacherous, and corrupt, in the field and in the cabinet, and a serviceable ally only as the fierce, fraudulent, and brutal guerilla. It is one of the most sagacious surmises of the historian Robertson, that if the archives of American affairs were once fairly thrown open to the public, the character of the Spanish might in some measure be relieved of the stain fixed upon it by the cruelty and rapacity of the discoverers and colonists of the New World. As Robertson's materials for his history were very scanty, not even comprising all the printed documents existing in his day, his surmise was at best a happy guess. Its correctness has been confirmed by Mr. Helps, who has employed in his researches printed authorities unavailable to Robertson, and has had access to manuscripts altogether unknown to him. The character of the early colonists and explorers remains much the same; but that of the Spanish monarchs and their advisers has gained materially by the larger resources of the historian. It now appears that, so far as the home-government was concerned, there was a strong desire to do justice to the Indians, and even a kindly disposition towards them. Neither was there so much ignorance in colonial affairs as the very novelty of the circumstances might have given reason to suppose; indeed, Mr. Helps more than once expresses his conviction, that modern colonial boards and secretaries would not have managed matters with more wisdom or humanity than Ferdinand and his councillors on some occasions displayed. We have so long been taught to regard the Arragonese monarch as a sort of royal attorney, that it is an agreeable surprise to discover that his shrewdness and selfishness were often abated by a sense of justice and sentiments of compunction, and that, in fact, the poor Indians had few better friends than the master to whom the papal bull had awarded them. His good intentions may indeed be attributed to the benign influence of Isabella of Castile, and doubtless the good seed was sown by her in his politic and not very susceptible bosom. Yet it bore fruit; since, after her decease, Ferdinand persevered in his desire to alleviate the miseries of his new subjects, and to govern his vast colonial empire with justice and even with mildness. It was his misfortune to be misled by his informants, and illserved by his delegates. He experienced "the common curse of kings," to be attended either by men who marred his instructions by their ignorance at home, or rendered them ineffectual by their corruption abroad. For one Columbus or Las Casas, he was forced to employ twenty Ovandos and Bobadillas. It was his misfortune also to need money for his European wars, and to live and die in the belief that the American colonies could supply him with speedy and inexhaustible returns of gold. It was the error of his age; it was the bait which even Columbus held out to the monarch, to induce him to countenance and to persevere in the discovery; it was the plea which all his councillors urged; it was the promise that every adventurer held forth when he sued for the royal commission-gold, and yet more gold. With the hope of quick returns of gold, Ferdinand, even against his own better judgment, signed his assent to the encomiendas and repartimientos; to the imposition of serfage on the Indians; to rending them from their homes; to dividing them in gangs; to overtasking them in the mine and in the maize-field; to supplying the void wrought by famine, pestilence, suicide, and the scourge, with negro labourers; to cruelties transcending the havoc of war; to privations surpassing the dearth of beleaguered cities. We must content ourselves with merely referring to the instructions given by Ferdinand and the council for Indian affairs to Columbus, and to the laws of Burgos, enacted after some of the worst results of the conquest had displayed themselves. The former are conceived in the more humane spirit: the latter, though not without consideration for the oppressed, evince a more callous temper in the legislators. The same radical vice appears in them both, the assumption of a right to the persons and the labour of the Indians. It was indeed an assumption deeply rooted in the social prejudices of the times, derived from antiquity, transmitted in the writings of Aristotle "the master of the wise" in the middle ages -accepted by all European legislators, prevalent throughout Asia, and unquestioned until negro-emancipation first established the principle that no circumstances justify the making or the holding of slaves. From the original guilt of this error the Spaniards in the sixteenth century are exempt. It was in the abuse of the assumed right that their guilt consisted. We shall perhaps be enabled to understand the dealings of the conquerors with the conquered more clearly, by reverting to the national characteristics of the Spaniards at this period, and to the causes that produced them. In the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella the Spaniards were almost as isolated and peculiar a people as the Hebrew race itself. Except in the great commercial cities of Cadiz and Barcelona, they had little intercourse with the rest of Europe. Within the rocky basins of their own sierras the provinces of the peninsula had little communication with one another. Local jealousies were rife: the Castilian looked askance at the Estremaduran; the natives of Biscay had no dealings with those of Andalusia. In no land did the pride of birth so much assume the aspect of a passion. The least admixture of Moorish blood was as repulsive to a pure Goth, in whose veins flowed the sangre azul, as the least tint of negro hue is to the precisians of New York and Boston. A descendant of Pelayo's followers would have deemed himself less dishonoured by a blow than by the friendly grasp of a Jew; and the lowest Manchegan serf was as proud of being an "old Christian" as a German baron of his sixteen quarterings. To the prejudices of birth and soil were added those of religion. All the nations of the earth admitted the supremacy of the Church, but, in his own esteem, the Spaniard was most Catholic. His antipathies clung to him even when serving his country abroad. The French he hated for his levity; the German and the Englishman for their gross meals and deep potations; the Fleming he accounted a huckster; the Italian a coward or an atheist. The contempt which he felt for the nations of Christendom was not likely to relax in favour of races who sat in outer darkness. To the Jew the oracles of God had once been confided; the Saracen professed to reverence the patriarchs and the lawgiver of the Old Testament; but the Indians had been from the beginning the F children of Satan, without law and without God in their world; and were given into the hands of the true believers, as the Canaanites had been of yore to the posterity of Jacob. So the Castilian in the sixteenth century thought and acted. Yet we should do him, or rather his nation, great injustice, if we thus concluded the reckoning of his qualities. Great virtues as well as great vices appertained to him. It was possible to hate, but hardly possible to despise him. In courage he was undaunted, in enterprise unwearied; his faith was sincere; his loyalty without blemish; and his very arrogance was a mark or an excess of selfrespect. Neither should the Spanish people be measured by the standard of the adventurers who flocked to the New World. Among the explorers and colonists were many both lay and secular for whom neither society nor religion need to blush,-men whom the most virtuous of commonwealths might rank among its heroes, and the least superstitious of churches adopt as its saints. But if camps are frequently the refuge of the most restless and ungovernable of spirits, much more so are expeditions of conquest and colonisation. The family-tie and the state-tie are alike relaxed, if not altogether broken: an adventurer cares not for the opinion of his neighbours or the rebuke of his household. He bears with him the arts and the strength of civilisation; but he himself returns, in some degree, to the freedom of the nomad. Mr. Helps's volumes abound in anecdotes of the early life and training of the more conspicuous pioneers of the conquest. Some, like Ojeda, were notorious for their physical strength; others, like Vasco Nuñez, were runaway debtors: this one had made his native place too hot to hold him; and another had set at naught the vice-chancellor and proctors of the university. The greater expeditions, like that of Cortes, were conducted by picked men; the importance of the venture demanding a careful choice of instruments. But the less extensive and systematic discoveries were undertaken by men resembling those who resorted to David in the cave of Adullam ; "every one that was in distress, and every one that was in debt, and every one that was discontented," flocked to the banner of some leader as reckless as themselves. Over such spirits the home-government had no control: and often a new region was explored and its inhabitants were expelled, enslaved, or even exterminated, before the council of the Indies could interfere, or the crown take them under its protection. It has been so usual to regard the Spanish monarchy as an unmixed despotism, and historians have so often confounded the powers exercised by Ferdinand the Catholic with those usurped by his successors after the battle at Villalar had crushed the liberties of Spain, that the reader who is not previously cognisant of the change may remark, with some surprise, how accessible Ferdinand was to the petitions, the representations, and even the rebuke of his subjects. Las Casas, after ineffectual patience in the antechamber, makes his way at last to the royal closet, and states the grievances of his Indian clients with freedom and favourable acceptance. Ferdinand is willing and even eager to listen to evidence, and puts what he has collected fairly before his council. His soldiers retain the freedom of their Gothic ancestors; and his priests are rather the directors than the keepers of his conscience. "He was reckoned The wisest prince that there had reigned by many A year before:" but his wisdom was not the cunning of his great-grandson Philip; and, compared with the jealousy and seclusion of the Escurial under his successor, Ferdinand was as free to all men as when justice was administered in the city-gates. There are few more tragic stories than that of the conquest of America; there is no more mournful spectacle than the long decrepitude of Spain; and history affords no more appalling example of the nemesis which impends equally over guilty households and guilty nations. Writing of the Indians as they appeared to the first explorers, Mr. Helps employs the following remarkable words: "In many parts of America the manners and perhaps the whole aspect of the people would have given a traveller the notion of persons of decayed fortune, who had once been more prosperous and formidable than they were now, or who had been the offshoot of a more defined and forcible people." Is not this the very aspect of the Spaniards at the present moment? the very burden of the poet's reproach? "Oh, could their ancient Incas rise again, How would they take up Israel's taunting strain ! Art thou too fallen, Iberia? do we see The robber and the murderer weak as we ? Thou that hast wasted earth, and dared despise The armies of Spain are no longer formidable to Europe; her navy is scarcely sufficient to defend any one of her principal harbours; her credit has sunk; her commerce is departed; no platefleet annually recruits her exchequer; no vice-roys depart from her shores; no slaves delve in her mines. Her chiefest of cities are too wide for their scanty population, and by their gloom and silence recall to the traveller the stillness of Bagdad and the sadness of Ispahan. Spain, since the reign of Philip II., has |