CHAPTER II

receiver and distributor of the metallic wealth and finds of the New World, and accomplished her task perfectly naturally and efficiently. But it was at the cost of her political and commercial future and greatness. If Spain had been a commercially independent nation, growing for Page 107 herself and supplying herself with her own manufactures, the metallic wealth of the New World would have stayed much longer in her lap, and Europe would have starved. But she was not. She produced little, and manufactured less, and the ill-gotten, blood-stained gain, which flowed to her shores from America, served only to feed an impractical vanity and to further unfit the nation for manufacturing and commercial life. The, to her, disastrous influence of Spain's shortlived empire endure to-day, for she is still as unfitted as ever by temperament and natural training for mercantile life. Such is the penalty her dower of New World gold and silver brought her. Finding she could purchase anything and everything with this gold and silver, she threw herself into her work of conquest, and let commerce go. Her manufactures came to her from England and the Netherlands—countries she sought to conquer and enslave; and thither her gold went in exchange, and before the century was out those countries had risen exulting over her. But the point to notice is this. Assuming this distributing function as her own and proper one, the only condition essential