uenced
spiritual affairs, and of this the propagation of the faith was an
instance. As the compromise between Spain and Portugal was very
indecisive, owing to the difference in longitude of the Azores and Cape
Verde, a second Act was signed on 7th June 1494, which placed the line
of demarcation 270 leagues farther to the west.

The colonization of the Spanish Indies, on its social and administrative
side, presents a curious contrast. On the one hand we see the Spanish
Crown, with high ideals of order and justice, of religious and political
unity, extending to its ultramarine possessions its faith, its language,
its laws and its administration; providing for the welfare of the
aborigines with paternal solicitude; endeavouring to restrain and temper
the passions of the conquerors; building churches and founding schools
and monasteries; in a word, trying to make its colonies an integral part
of the Spanish monarchy, "une societe vieille dans une contree neuve."
Some Spanish writers, it is true, have exaggerated the virtues of their
old colonial system; yet that system had excellences which we cannot
afford to despise. If the Spanish kings had not choked their government
with procrastination and routine; if they had only taken their task a
bit less seriously and had not tried to apply too strictly to an empty
continent the paternal administration of an older country; we might have
been privileged to witness the development and operation of as complete
and benign a system of colonial government as has been devised in modern
times. The public initiative of the Spanish government, and the care
with which it selected its colonists, compare very favourably with the
opportunism of the English and the French, who colonized by chance
private activity and sent the worst elements of their population,
criminals and vagabonds, to people their new settlements across the sea.
However much we may deprecate the treatment of the Indians by the
_conquistadores_, we must not forget that the greater part of the
population of Spanish America to-day is still Indian, and that no other
colonizing people have succeeded like the Spaniards in assimilating and
civilizing the natives. The code of laws which the Spaniards gradually
evolved for the rule of their transmarine provinces, was, in spite of
defects which are visible only to the larger experience of the present
day, one of the wisest, most humane and best co-ordinated of any to this
day publish