d VI., who
also died, in 1759, and was succeeded by his brother, Philip's second
son, who was known as Carlos III. When we try to praise these princes
of the wretched Bourbon line, it is by mention of the evil they have
refrained from doing rather than the good they have done. So Carlos
III. is said to have done less harm to Spain than his predecessors. He
established libraries and academies of science and of arts, and
ruled like a kind-hearted gentleman, without the vices of his recent
predecessors. His severity toward the Jesuits and their forcible
expulsion from Spain, in 1767, are said to have been caused by
personal resentment on account of some slanderous rumors regarding his
birth, which were traced to them.

CHAPTER XXI.

But the fate of Spain was not now in the hands of her Kings. Were they
good or evil she was destined henceforth to drift in the currents of
_circumstance_, that sternest of masters, to whom her Kings as well
as her people would be obliged helplessly to bow. All that she now
possessed outside the borders of her own kingdom was the West Indies,
her colonies in America, North and South, and the Philippines,
that archipelago of a thousand isles in the southern Pacific, where
Magellan was slain by the savage inhabitants after he had discovered
it (1520).

Mexico and Peru had proved to be inexhaustible sources of wealth, and
when the gold and silver diminished, the Viceroys in these and the
other colonies could compel the people to wring rich products out of
the soil, enough to supply Spain's necessities. The inhabitants of
these colonies, composed of the aboriginal races with an admixture of
Spanish, had been treated as slaves and drudges for so many centuries
that they never dreamed of resistance, nor questioned the justice of a
fate which condemned them always to toil for Spain.

In the North the feeble colony planted in 1620 had expanded into
thirteen vigorous English colonies. France, too, had been colonizing
in America, and had drawn her frontier line from the mouth of the
Mississippi to Canada. In 1755 a collision occurred between England
and France over their American boundaries. By the year 1759, France
had lost Quebec and every one of her strongholds, and she formed an
alliance with Spain in a last effort to save her vanishing possessions
in America.

Spain's punishment for this interference was swift. England promptly
dispatched ships to Havana and to the Philippines; and wh