dia and
South Africa, and a very serious attempt was made during the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries to bring to Europe every possible material,
plant or mineral, that might be of value for human health and at the
same time to increase the bounds of human knowledge by careful
investigation.

Nor was this thoroughly scientific and practical education confined
only to the upper classes nor exclusively to those of Spanish birth
and blood. Even "the wild Indians," as Bourne tells us, "were
successfully gathered together in a village called a Mission where,
under the increasing supervision of the friars, they were taught the
elements of letters and trained to peaceful, industrious and religious
lives. In fact every mission was an industrial school, where the
simple arts were taught by the friars, themselves in origin plain
Spanish peasants." He continues, "Spanish America, from California and
Texas, to Paraguay and Chili, was fringed with such establishments,
the outposts of civilization, where many thousands of Indians went
through a schooling which ended only with their lives." Bourne goes so
far as to say "every town, Indian as well, as Spanish, was by law
required to have its church, hospital, and school for teaching Indian
children Spanish and the elements of religion." The Spaniards were
actually anticipating for the young Indians some of the modes of
vocational education, interest in which is only just being aroused
among us at the present time.

No wonder that the work of conversion in Mexico followed hard upon the
heels of conquest, and to quote Bourne's words farther, "The Aztec
priesthood relaxed its bonds and the masses were relieved from the
earlier burdens of the faith. In the old world the progress from
actual to vicarious sacrifice for sin had been slow and painful
through the ages; in the new it was accomplished in but a single
generation. The old religion had inculcated a relatively high
morality, but its dreadful rites overhung the present life like a
black cloud and for the future it offered little consolation." ..."The
work of the Church was rapidly adapted to the new field of labor." The
triumph of the Church's influence was the preservation of the natives
and their gradual uplift. This was a slow process and required almost
divine patience, but it was infinitely better than the method by which
the English-speaking colonies, in a chapter of history that is almost
untellable in its {497} completen