s which have for the time being put us so
far ahead of the Spanish Americans are mostly the gains of the age of
steam and are due to the fact that it was hard for their mixed
population with so many barbarous elements {498} in them to keep up
with our comparatively homogeneous population, homogeneous at least in
the sense of coming from the same strata and civilization in Europe.
While our Indians have been almost entirely obliterated there are more
Indians alive in Mexico and in South America to-day than there were
when Columbus landed. With this fact in mind Professor Bourne's
comparison and contrast takes on renewed interest and his apology for
the Spanish Americans is all the more telling.

"If we compare Spanish America with the United States a hundred
years ago we must recognize that while in the North there was a
sounder body politic, a purer social life and a more general
dissemination of elementary education, yet in Spanish America there
were both vastly greater wealth and greater poverty, _more imposing
monuments of civilization, such as public buildings, institutions of
learning and hospitals, more populous and richer cities, a higher
attainment in certain branches of science_. No one can read
Humboldt's account of the City of Mexico and its establishments for
the promotion of science and the fine arts without realizing that
whatever may be the superiorities of the United States over Mexico
in these respects, they have been mostly the gains of the age of
steam."

If one reads Champlain's account of the City of Mexico as he saw it at
the very beginning of the seventeenth century, as I have quoted it in
the chapter "America in Columbus' Century," in "The Century of
Columbus" (_Catholic Summer School Press. New York, 1914_), it will be
quite clear that Humboldt was only seeing the natural development of
culture and artistic progress that was already in evidence in the
early sixteenth century.

"During the first half-century," Bourne continues, "after the
application of steam to transportation Mexico weltered in domestic
turmoils arising out of the crash of the old regime. If the rule of
Spain could have lasted half a century longer, being progressively
as it was during the reign of Charles III; if a succession of such
viceroys as Revilla Gigedo, in Mexico, and De Croix and De Taboaday
Lemos, in Peru, could have borne sway in America until railroads
could have been bu