all empire, but they let the wealth of the Indies flow through their
country, principally to London and Amsterdam, there to form in more
practical hands the basis of the British and Dutch colonial empires.

The priest and the soldier were supreme, so her best sons took up
either the cross or the sword to maintain her dominion in the distant
colonies, a movement which, long continued, spelled for her a form of
national suicide. The soldier expended his strength and generally laid
down his life on alien soil, leaving no fit successor of his own stock
to carry on the work according to his standards. The priest under the
celibate system, in its better days left no offspring at all and in
the days of its corruption none bred and reared under the influences
that make for social and political progress. The dark chambers of the
Inquisition stifled all advance in thought, so the civilization and
the culture of Spain, as well as her political system, settled into
rigid forms to await only the inevitable process of stagnation and
decay. In her proudest hour an old soldier, who had lost one of his
hands fighting her battles against the Turk at Lepanto, employed the
other in writing the masterpiece of her literature, which is really
a caricature of the nation.

There is much in the career of Spain that calls to mind the dazzling
beauty of her "dark-glancing daughters," with its early bloom,
its startling--almost morbid--brilliance, and its premature
decay. Rapid and brilliant was her rise, gradual and inglorious
her steady decline, from the bright morning when the banners of
Castile and Aragon were flung triumphantly from the battlements of
the Alhambra, to the short summer, not so long gone, when at Cavite
and Santiago with swift, decisive havoc the last ragged remnants of
the once world-dominating power were blown into space and time,