itory as the Spanish and Portuguese
sea-captains could circumnavigate and the pope in the plentitude of his
power and his generosity could bestow on his fortunate son, in America;
all this enormous proportion of the habitable globe was the private
property, of Philip; who was the son of Charles, who was the son of
Joanna, who was the daughter of Isabella, whose husband was Ferdinand. By
what seems to us the most whimsical of political arrangements, the Papuan
islander, the Calabrian peasant, the Amsterdam merchant, the
semi-civilized Aztec, the Moor of Barbary, the Castilian grandee, the
roving Camanche, the Guinea negro, the Indian Brahmin, found
themselves--could they but have known it--fellow-citizens of one
commonwealth. Statutes of family descent, aided by fraud, force, and
chicane, had annexed the various European sovereignties to the crown of
Spain; the genius of a Genoese sailor had given to it the New World, and
more recently the conquest of Portugal, torn from hands not strong enough
to defend the national independence, had vested in the same sovereignty
those Oriental possessions which were due to the enterprise of Vasco de
Gama, his comrades and successors. The voyager, setting forth from the
straits of Gibraltar, circumnavigating the African headlands and Cape
Comorin, and sailing through the Molucca channel and past the isles which
bore the name of Philip in the Eastern sea, gave the hand at last to his
adventurous comrade, who, starting from the same point, and following
westward in the track of Magellaens and under the Southern Cross, coasted
the shore of Patagonia, and threaded his path through unmapped and
unnumbered clusters of islands in the Western Pacific; and during this
spanning of the earth's whole circumference not an inch of land or water
was traversed that was not the domain of Philip.

For the sea, too, was his as well as the dry land.

From Borneo to California the great ocean was but a Spanish lake, as much
the king's private property as his fish-ponds at the Escorial with their
carp and perch. No subjects but his dared to navigate those sacred
waters. Not a common highway of the world's commerce, but a private path
for the gratification of one human being's vanity, had thus been laid out
by the bold navigators of the sixteenth century.

It was for the Dutch rebels to try conclusions upon this point, as they
had done upon so many others, with the master of the land and sea. The
opening s