ot even the healthy excitement of exploration
and adventure, but gold and silver. They had many great qualities;
they were bold, enterprising, temperate, patient of suffering,
enthusiastic, and gifted with intense national feeling. When to these
qualities are added the advantages of Spain's position and
well-situated ports, the fact that she was first to occupy large and
rich portions of the new worlds and long remained without a
competitor, and that for a hundred years after the discovery of
America she was the leading State in Europe, she might have been
expected to take the foremost place among the sea powers. Exactly the
contrary was the result, as all know. Since the battle of Lepanto in
1571, though engaged in many wars, no sea victory of any consequence
shines on the pages of Spanish history; and the decay of her commerce
sufficiently accounts for the painful and sometimes ludicrous
inaptness shown on the decks of her ships of war. Doubtless such a
result is not to be attributed to one cause only. Doubtless the
government of Spain was in many ways such as to cramp and blight a
free and healthy development of private enterprise; but the character
of a great people breaks through or shapes the character of its
government, and it can hardly be doubted that had the bent of the
people been toward trade, the action of government would have been
drawn into the same current. The great field of the colonies, also,
was remote from the centre of that despotism which blighted the growth
of old Spain. As it was, thousands of Spaniards, of the working as
well as the upper classes, left Spain; and the occupations in which
they engaged abroad sent home little but specie, or merchandise of
small bulk, requiring but small tonnage. The mother-country herself
produced little but wool, fruit, and iron; her manufactures were
naught; her industries suffered; her population steadily decreased.
Both she and her colonies depended upon the Dutch for so many of the
necessaries of life, that the products of their scanty industries
could not suffice to pay for them. "So that Holland merchants," writes
a contemporary, "who carry money to most parts of the world to buy
commodities, must out of this single country of Europe carry home
money, which they receive in payment of their goods." Thus their
eagerly sought emblem of wealth passed quickly from their hands. It
has already been pointed out how weak, from a military point of view,
Spain was f