ether great men were thus numerously
produced by nature in that region by way of compensation for the paucity
and poverty of other products; and whether it was because of their
innate genius or because of their desire to seek a better land than
their own, that they became the adventurers that they were. The other
province which most contributed to the founding of Cuba had from time
immemorial been noted for its wealth and culture. In the days of the
Caesars it had been the favorite colonial resort of the plutocracy and
aristocracy of Rome, and it had been the birthplace of the Emperors
Hadrian, Trajan and Theodosius. Under the Catholic Kings it was the
capital and the metropolis of Spain and the chief mart of her world-wide
commerce. Indeed it would not be difficult to establish the proposition
that it was with the removal of the capital from Seville to Madrid, and
the change of national and international policy which was inseparably
associated with that removal, that the decline of Spain began.

Cuba was thus in her foundation the fortunate recipient of the rugged
and masterful spirit of Estremadura, and of the elements of government
and of social grace and intellectual power which Seville could so well
and so abundantly supply; and these two contrasting yet by no means
incompatible elements became characteristic of the Cuban people;
complementarily contributing to the development of a national character
quite distinct from that of the Mother Country or that of any other of
her offshoots. For the Cuban people and their social organism, separated
far from Spain, though subject to her rule, retained largely unimpaired
their pristine vigor, and avoided sharing in the degeneracy and decline
which befell the Peninsula soon after the malign Hapsburg influence
became dominant in its affairs of state; a decline which in the
Seventeenth Century became one of the most distressing and pathetic
tragedies in the drama of the world.

It was an interesting and a significant circumstance, too, that while
Spain was resplendent and exultant in the Golden Age of the Sixteenth
Century, Cuba remained intellectually dormant and inactive, and that
when at the end of the Eighteenth Century Spain reached her nadir of
degradation, Cuba began to rise to intellectual puissance. While Spain
was great, it was to be said of Cuba _stat nominis umbra_; but when
Spain declined, Cuba arose to take her place, insistent that the race
and its letters, at