s I personally am concerned,--a matter needless to say of very
trifling consequence,--this verdict was rendered a year ago. It was
somewhat Rhadamanthine; but a twelve-month of further reflection has
shown no cause in any respect to revise it. In referring to what was
then plainly impending, in December, 1897, before the blowing up of the
battleship _Maine_, before a conflict had become inevitable, I used this
language in a paper read to the Massachusetts Historical Society: "When
looking at the vicissitudes of human development, we are apt to assume a
certain air of optimism, and take advancement as the law of being, as a
thing of course, indisputable. We are charitable, too; and to deny to
any given race or people some degree of use in the economy of Nature, or
the plan of Creation, is usually regarded as indicative of narrowness of
view. The fatal, final word "pessimist" is apt to be whispered in
connection with the name of one who ventures to suggest a doubt of this
phase of the doctrine known as Universalism. And yet, at this time when,
before our eyes, it is breathing its last, I want some one to point out
a single good thing in law, or science, or art, or literature,--material,
moral or intellectual,--which has resulted to the race of man upon earth
from Spanish domination in America. I have tried to think of one in
vain. It certainly has not yielded an immortality, an idea, or a
discovery; it has, in fact, been one long record of reaction and
retrogression, than which few pages in the record of mankind have been
more discouraging or less fruitful of good. What is now taking place in
Cuba is historical. It is the dying out of a dominion, the influence of
which will be seen and felt for centuries in the life of two continents;
just as what is taking place in Turkey is the last fierce flickering up
of Asiatic rule in Europe, on the very spot where twenty-four centuries
ago Asiatic rule in Europe was thought to have been averted forever. The
two, Ottoman rule in Europe, and Spanish rule in America, now stand at
the bar of history; and, scanning the long four-century record of each,
I have been unable to see what either has contributed to the accumulated
possessions of the human race, or why both should not be classed among
the many instances of the arrested civilization of a race, developing by
degrees an irresistible tendency to retrogression."

This, one year ago; and while the embers of the last Greco-Turkish
stru