ggle, still white, were scarcely cold on the plain of Marathon. The
time since passed has yielded fresh proof in support of this harsh
judgment; for, if there is one historical law better and more
irreversibly established than another, it is that, in the case of
nations even more than in the case of individuals, their sins will find
them out,--the day of reckoning may not be escaped. Noticeably, has
this proved so in the case of Spain. The year 1500 may be said to have
found that country at the apex of her greatness. America had then been
newly discovered; the Moor was just subdued. Nearly half a century
before (1453) the Roman Empire had fallen, and, with the storming of
Constantinople by the Saracens, disappeared from the earth. That event,
it may be mentioned in passing, closed another world drama continuous
through twenty-two centuries,--upon the whole the most wonderful of the
series. And so, when Roman empire vanished, that of Spain began. It was
ushered in by the landfall of Columbus; and when, just three hundred
years later, in 1792, the subject was discussed in connection with its
third centennial, the general verdict of European thinkers was that the
discovery of America had, upon the whole, been to mankind the reverse of
beneficent. This conclusion has since been commented upon with derision;
yet, when made, it was right. The United States had in 1792 just
struggled into existence, and its influence on the course of human
events had not begun to make itself felt. Those who considered the
subject had before them, therefore, only Spanish domination in America,
and upon that their verdict cannot be gainsaid; for, from the year 1492
down, the history of Spain and Spanish domination has undeniably been
one long series of crimes and violations of natural law, the penalty for
which has not apparently even yet been exacted in full.

Of those national crimes four stand out in special prominence,
constituting counts in a national indictment than which history shows
few more formidable. These four were: (1) The expulsion, first, of the
Jews, and then of the Moors, or Moriscoes, from Spain, late in the
fifteenth and early in the sixteenth centuries; (2) the annals of "the
Council of Blood" in the Netherlands, and the eighty years of
internecine warfare through which Holland fought its way out from under
Spanish rule; (3) the Inquisition, the most ingenious human machinery
ever invented to root out and destroy whatever a p