ched."

*****

The reader who has carefully followed the fortunes of the great
discoverer understands from the history the character of the man. He
would not have succeeded in his long suit at the court of Ferdinand and
Isabella, had he not been a person of single purpose and iron will.

From the moment when he was in command of the first expedition, that
expedition went prosperously to its great success, in precisely the way
which he had foreseen and determined. True, he did not discover Asia, as
he had hoped, but this was because America was in the way. He showed in
that voyage all the attributes of a great discoverer; he deserved the
honors which were paid to him on his return.

As has been said, however, this does not mean that he was a great
organizer of cities, or that he was the right person to put in charge of
a newly founded colony. It has happened more than once in the history
of nations that a great general, who can conquer armies and can obtain
peace, has not succeeded in establishing a colony or in governing a
city.

On the other hand, it is fair to say that Columbus never had a chance to
show what he would have been in the direction of his colonies had they
been really left in his charge. This is true, that his heart was always
on discovery; all the time that he spent in the wretched detail of the
arrangement of a new-built town was time which really seemed to him
wasted.

The great problem was always before him, how he should connect his
discoveries with the knowledge which Europe had before of the coast of
Asia. Always it seemed to him that the dominions of the Great Khan were
within his reach. Always he was eager for that happy moment when he
should find himself in personal communication with that great monarch,
who had been so long the monarch of the East--who, as he thought, would
prove to be the monarch of the West.

Columbus died with the idea that he had come close to Asia. Even
a generation after his death, the companions of Cortes gave to the
peninsula of California that name because it was the name given in
romance to the farthest island of the eastern Indies.

Columbus met with many reverses, and died, one might almost say, a
broken-hearted man. But history has been just to him, and has placed
him in the foremost rank of the men who have set the world forward. And,
outside of the technical study of history, those who like to trace the
laws on which human progress advances have been pr