world-dominion. Their bulletins had long "filled the earth with their
vainglorious vaunts, making great appearance of victories"; they had
spread their propaganda "in sundry languages in print," distributing
braggart pamphlets in which they boasted, for the benefit of neutrals,
of their successes against England, France, and Italy. They had "abused
and tormented" the wretched inhabitants of the Low Countries, and they
held that the force of arms which they brandished would weigh against
justice, humanity, and freedom in the servitude which they meant to
inflict upon Europe. It was to be _Spanien über alles_.

But there was one particular nation against which the malignity of the
great enemy blazed most fiercely. The King of Spain blasphemously
regarded himself as the instrument of God, and there was one country
which more than the rest frustrated his pious designs. This was England,
and for that reason England was more bitterly hated than any other
enemy. The Spaniards did "more greedily thirst after English blood than
after the lives of any other people of Europe." The avowed purpose of
Castile was to destroy that maritime supremacy of England on which the
very existence of the English State depends. The significance of Sir
Walter Raleigh consists in the clairvoyance with which he perceived and
the energy with which he combated this monstrous assumption. Other noble
Englishmen of his time, and before his time, had been clear-sighted and
had struck hard against the evil tyranny of Spanish dynastic militarism,
but no other man before or since was so luminously identified with
resistance. He struts upon the stage of battle with the limelight full
upon him. The classic writing of the crisis is contained in the _Last
Fight of the Revenge at Sea_ of 1591, where the splendid defiance and
warning of the Preface are like trumpets blown to the four quarters of
the globe. Raleigh stands out as the man who above all others laboured,
as he said, "against the ambitious and bloody pretences of the