ir
conquerors. But it was the protection of a subject race doomed to the
condition of Helotage; they were protected, as the Jews were protected
by the kings of mediaeval England, because they were a valuable asset
of the crown. The policy of the Spanish government did not avail to
prevent an intermixture of the races, because the Spaniards themselves
came from a sub-tropical country, and the Mexicans and Peruvians
especially were separated from them by no impassable gulf such as
separates the negro or the Australian bushman from the white man.
Central and Southern America thus came to be peopled by a hybrid race,
speaking Spanish, large elements of which were conscious of their own
inferiority. This in itself would perhaps have been a barrier to
progress. But the concentration of attention upon the precious metals,
and the neglect of industry due to this cause and to the employment of
slave-labour, formed a further obstacle. And in addition to all, the
Spanish government, partly with a view to the execution of its native
policy, partly because it regarded the precious metals as the chief
product of these lands and wished to maintain close control over them,
and partly because centralised autocracy was carried to its highest
pitch in Spain, allowed little freedom of action to the local
governments, and almost none to the settlers. It treated the trade of
these lands as a monopoly of the home country, to be carried on under
the most rigid control. It did little or nothing to develop the natural
resources of the empire, but rather discouraged them lest they should
compete with the labours of the mine; and in what concerned the
intellectual welfare of its subjects, it limited itself, as in Spain,
to ensuring that no infection of heresy or freethought should reach any
part of its dominions. All this had a deadening effect; and the
surprising thing is, not that the Spanish Empire should have fallen
into an early decrepitude, but that it should have shown such
comparative vigour, tenacity, and power of expansion as it actually
exhibited. Not until the nineteenth century did the vast natural
resources of these regions begin to undergo any rapid development; that
is to say, not until most of the settlements had discarded the
connection with Spain; and even then, the defects bred into the people
by three centuries of reactionary and unenlightened government produced
in them an incapacity to use their newly won freedom, and condemn