deserts, mighty mountain chains, torrential streams and majestic
rivers, marked the surface of the country. This vast territory
stretched from the temperate prairies west of the Mississippi
down to the steaming lowlands of Central America, then up through
tablelands in the southern continent to high plateaus, miles
above sea level, where the sun blazed and the cold, dry air was
hard to breathe, and then higher still to the lofty peaks of the
Andes, clad in eternal snow or pouring fire and smoke from their
summits in the clouds, and thence to the lower temperate valleys,
grassy pampas, and undulating hills of the far south.

Scattered over these vast colonial domains in the Western World
were somewhere between 12,000,000 and 19,000,000 people subject
to Spain, and perhaps 3,000,000, to Portugal; the great majority
of them were Indians and negroes, the latter predominating in the
lands bordering on the Caribbean Sea and along the shores of
Brazil. Possibly one-fourth of the inhabitants came of European
stock, including not only Spaniards and their descendants but
also the folk who spoke English in the Floridas and French in
Louisiana.

During the centuries which had elapsed since the entry of the
Spaniards and Portuguese into these regions an extraordinary
fusion of races had taken place. White, red, and black had
mingled to such an extent that the bulk of the settled population
became half-caste. Only in the more temperate regions of the far
north and south, where the aborigines were comparatively few or
had disappeared altogether, did the whites remain racially
distinct. Socially the Indian and the negro counted for little.
They constituted the laboring class on whom all the burdens fell