Spanish Sovereigns and so acquiring immense dignity and glory for
himself. He believed that gold was in itself a very precious and
estimable thing; he knew that masses and candles could be bought for it,
and very real spiritual privileges; and as he made blunder after blunder,
and saw evil after evil heaping itself on his record in the New World, he
became the more eager and frantic to acquire such a treasure of gold that
it would wipe out the other evils of his administration. And once
involved in that circle, there was no help for him.

The man himself was a simple man; capable, when the whole of his various
qualities were directed upon one single thing, of that greatness which is
the crown of simplicity. Ambition was the keynote of his life; not an
unworthy keynote, by any means, if only the ambition be sound; but one
serious defect of Columbus's ambition was that it was retrospective
rather than perspective. He may have had, before he sailed from Palos,
an ambition to be the discoverer of a New World; but I do not think he
had. He believed there were islands or land to be discovered in the West
if only he pushed on far enough; and he was ambitious to find them and
vindicate his belief. Afterwards, when he had read a little more, and
when he conceived the plan of pretending that he had all along meant to
discover the Indies and a new road to the East, he acted in accordance
with that pretence; he tried to make his acts appear retrospectively as
though they had been prompted by a design quite different from that by
which they had really been prompted. When he found that his discovery
was regarded as a great scientific feat, he made haste to pretend that it
had all along been meant as such, and was in fact the outcome of an
elaborate scientific theory. In all this there is nothing for praise or
admiration. It indicates the presence of moral disease; but fortunately
it is functional rather than organic disease. He was right and sound at
heart; but he spread his sails too readily to the great winds of popular