Thus the dozen kingdoms of Spain, the seventeen provinces of the
Netherlands, the kingdoms of the Two Sicilies, the duchy of Milan, and
certain fortresses and districts of Tuscany, in Europe; the kingdom of
Barbary, the coast of Guinea, and an indefinite and unmeasured expanse.
of other territory, in Africa; the controlling outposts and cities all
along the coast of the two Indian peninsulas, with as much of the country
as it seemed good to occupy, the straits and the, great archipelagoes, so
far as they had--been visited'by Europeans, in Asia; Peru, Brazil,
Mexico, the Antilles--the whole recently discovered fourth quarter of the
world in short, from the "Land of Fire" in the South to the frozen
regions of the North--as much territory as the Spanish and Portuguese
sea-captains could circumnavigate and the pope in the plentitude of his
power and his generosity could bestow on his fortunate son, in America;
all this enormous proportion of the habitable globe was the private
property, of Philip; who was the son of Charles, who was the son of
Joanna, who was the daughter of Isabella, whose husband was Ferdinand.
By what seems to us the most whimsical of political arrangements, the
Papuan islander, the Calabrian peasant, the Amsterdam merchant, the semi-
civilized Aztec, the Moor of Barbary, the Castilian grandee, the roving
Camanche, the Guinea negro, the Indian Brahmin, found themselves--could
they but have known it--fellow-citizens of one commonwealth. Statutes of
family descent, aided by fraud, force, and chicane, had annexed the
various European sovereignties to the crown of Spain; the genius of a
Genoese sailor had given to it the New World, and more recently the
conquest of Portugal, torn from hands not strong enough to defend the
national independence, had vested in the same sovereignty those Oriental
possessions which were due to the enterprise of Vasco de Gama, his
comrades and successors. The, voyager, setting forth from the straits of
Gibraltar, circumnavigating the African headlands and Cape Comorin, and