stepped it centuries before it did. It was human ignorance deeper
than the Atlantic, and bigotry stormier than its waves, which walled the
western horizon of Europe for so long. But for that, Columbus himself
would have found America ten years sooner than he did; and for
that matter, America would not have waited for Columbus's
five-times-great-grandfather to be born. It was really a strange thing
how the richest half of the world played so long at hide-and-seek with
civilization; and how at last it was found, through the merest chance,
by those who sought something entirely different. Had America waited to
be discovered by some one seeking a new continent, it might be waiting
yet.

Despite the fact that long before Columbus vagrant crews of half a dozen
different races had already reached the New World, they had left
neither mark on America nor result in civilization; and Europe, at the
very brink of the greatest discovery and the greatest events in history,
never dreamed of it. Columbus himself had no imaginings of America. Do
you know what he started westward to find? _Asia._

The investigations of recent years have greatly changed our estimates of
Columbus. The tendency of a generation ago was to transform him to a
demigod,--an historical figure, faultless, rounded, all noble. That was
absurd; for Columbus was only a man, and all men, however great, fall
short of perfection. The tendency of the present generation is to go to
the other extreme,--to rob him of every heroic quality, and make him out
an unhanged pirate and a contemptible accident of fortune; so that we
are in a fair way to have very little Columbus left. But this is equally
unjust and unscientific. Columbus in his own field was a great man
despite his failings, and far from a contemptible one.

To understand him, we must first have some general understanding of the
age in which he lived. To measure how much of an inventor of the great
idea he was, we must find out what the world's ideas then were, and how
much they helped or hindered him.

In those far days geography was a very curious affair indeed. A map of
the world then was something which very few of us would be able to
identify at all; for all the wise men of all the earth knew less of the
world's topography than an eight-year old schoolboy knows to-day. It
had been decided at last that the world was not flat, but round,--though
even that fundamental knowledge was not yet old; but as to what co