the Moorish works which centuries ago brought fertility to grain-fields and orchards, and made the country the garden of Europe.
There was another nation who seem to have far surpassed both Moors and Aztecs in the magnitude of their engineering-works for this purpose. The Peruvians cut through mountains, filled up valleys, and carried whole rivers away in artificial channels to irrigate their thirsty soil. The historians’ accounts of these water-works as they were, and even travellers’ descriptions of the ruins that still remain, fill us with astonishment. It seems almost like some strange fatality that this nation too should have been conquered by the same race, the ruin of its great national works following immediately upon the Conquest.
Spain is rising again after long centuries of degradation, and is developing energies and resources which seem likely to raise it high among European nations, and the Spaniards are beginning to hold their own again among the peoples of Europe. But they have had to pay dearly for the errors of their ancestors in the great days of Charles the Fifth.