the seeds of the greatest nation that the world is likely to behold.

It was, humanly speaking, singularly unfortunate for Spanish dominion in
America, that the earliest discoveries of the Spaniards were those of the
West India Islands. A multiplicity of governors introduced confusion,
feebleness, and want of system, into colonial government. The numbers,
comparatively few, of the original inhabitants in each island, were
rapidly removed from the scene of action; and the Spaniards lacked, at the
beginning, that compressing force which would have been found in the
existence of a body of natives who could not have been removed by the
outrages of Spanish cruelty, the strength of Spanish liquors, or the
virulence of Spanish diseases.[Footnote 2]

[Footnote 2: The smallpox, for instance, was a disease introduced by the
Spaniards, which the comparatively feeble constitution of the Indians
could not withstand.]

The Monarchs of Spain, too, would have been compelled to treat their new
discoveries and conquests more seriously. To have held the country at all,
they must have held it well. It would not have been Ovandos, Bobadillas,
Nicuesas and Ojedas who could have been employed to govern, discover,
conquer, colonize--and ruin by their folly--the Spanish possessions in the
Indies. The work of discovery and conquest, begun by Columbus, must then
have been entrusted to men like Cortes, the Pizarros, Vasco Nunez, or the
President Gasca; and a colony or a kingdom founded by any of these men
might well have remained a great colony, or a great kingdom, to the
present day.
ARTHUR HELPS.
London, October, 1868.