ers from there.... It is
manifest," he goes on, "that the West Indies, being as the stomach to
Spain (for from it nearly all the revenue is drawn), must be joined to
the Spanish head by a sea force; and that Naples and the Netherlands,
being like two arms, they cannot lay out their strength for Spain, nor
receive anything thence but by shipping,--all which may easily be done
by our shipping in peace, and by it obstructed in war." Half a century
before, Sully, the great minister of Henry IV., had characterized
Spain "as one of those States whose legs and arms are strong and
powerful, but the heart infinitely weak and feeble." Since his day the
Spanish navy had suffered not only disaster, but annihilation; not
only humiliation, but degradation. The consequences briefly were that
shipping was destroyed; manufactures perished with it. The government
depended for its support, not upon a wide-spread healthy commerce and
industry that could survive many a staggering blow, but upon a narrow
stream of silver trickling through a few treasure-ships from America,
easily and frequently intercepted by an enemy's cruisers. The loss of
half a dozen galleons more than once paralyzed its movements for a
year. While the war in the Netherlands lasted, the Dutch control of
the sea forced Spain to send her troops by a long and costly journey
overland instead of by sea; and the same cause reduced her to such
straits for necessaries that, by a mutual arrangement which seems very
odd to modern ideas, her wants were supplied by Dutch ships, which
thus maintained the enemies of their country, but received in return
specie which was welcome in the Amsterdam exchange. In America, the
Spanish protected themselves as best they might behind masonry,
unaided from home; while in the Mediterranean they escaped insult and
injury mainly through the indifference of the Dutch, for the French
and English had not yet begun to contend for mastery there. In the
course of history the Netherlands, Naples, Sicily, Minorca, Havana,
Manila, and Jamaica were wrenched away, at one time or another, from
this empire without a shipping. In short, while Spain's maritime
impotence may have been primarily a symptom of her general decay, it
became a marked factor in precipitating her into the abyss from which
she has not yet wholly emerged.

Except Alaska, the United States has no outlying possession,--no foot
of ground inaccessible by land. Its contour is such as to present