that, whether it springs from the abolition of slavery or the adoption of Free Trade by Britain a few years later, or from both causes combined, they have perished as an economic factor in the world's industry. During a century their star has declined: and the remainder of their history offers little but gloom-a gloom that is the more depressing when contrasted with the brightness of their past, and the ideal beauty of their situation.

BOOK III

THE BEGINNING OF THE WORLD STRUGGLE: 1588-1713

CHAPTER I

THE LOSS OF SPAIN'S SUPREMACY: 1588-17001

THE close of the Middle Ages in Europe was marked by three great events. When Constantinople was taken by the Turks in the year 1453, the West was again awakened to the danger of being crushed beneath the civil and religious

despotism of an alien race. Forty years later, the discovery of America and the new routes to the Indies more than compensated for the loss of the Greek empire. And meanwhile the renascence was slowly spreading from Italy into every country that had any pretence to civilisation.

The peril from Islám proved illusory. The Turks were exhausted by their last great effort; and although they made many more incursions westwards, one even so far as Vienna, they were always driven back, and the hatred and fear with which they were regarded changed gradually to contempt, as the power of the Crescent declined.

1 Authorities.--Prescott and Robertson are still useful as showing the internal state of the country. There is an invaluable chapter on the decline of Spain in Buckle's History of Civilisation. The modern history of Spain exists only in fragments; Coxe's Bourbon Kings is the best for the English reader; and Major Hume throws light on the last century. Cervantes gives an inimitable picture of the life of his country in the time of Philip III.; Calderon, whom Sismondi calls the poet of the Inquisition, and Lope de Vega have an endless series of dramas. Despite Napoleon's dictum to the contrary, Lesage's Gil Blas may be taken as an accurate description of Spain in the generations after Don Quixote.

The effects of the renascence, mingling with, attracted to or repelled by the reformation in religion, were different in different countries, illustrating curiously the distinctions of race and thought in Europe.

The Renascence in Europe.

In Italy, where liberty was already dead, the lustre of the liberal arts hid the tyranny and depravity of her princes. In the land which had conserved more of the ancient traditions than any other, the enthusiasm for classical learning reached its highest point under the patronage of splendid despots. But the wisdom of its scholars was of a temper coldly intellectual; there was no moral or religious reformation. The denunciations of Savonarola fell helplessly against the indifference of Florence, as he died the martyr of a ruined cause; the moral decadence of Venice and Naples was then, as now, cloaked with the fatal gift of beauty that has been vouchsafed the whole peninsula. The lower people were untouched by the renascence; the upper classes, having thrown aside the old garment of faith, donned no new one. And the outer contrast of palace and hovel was and is still deepened by the inner contrast of careless disbelief and unquestioning devotion, of haughty pride and pathetic servility.

In France, the religious indifference of Italy mingled with the religious fervour of Germany, as renascence and reformation clashed against the older Catholicism and each other. Civil war that developed into anarchy invaded the land. Patriotism hid her head; liberty was lost. The political ruin which disunion brought upon Germany might have been the fate of France had not Henry of Navarre, with a cynicism worthy of Montaigne, changed his religion as the price of his kingdom. But with the abandonment of the Huguenots by the king, France as a whole came slowly round to the old belief, and the strength of Catholicism was probably deepened by the bitter struggle. Yet the scoffers were not subdued; side by side with the untroubled faith that exists to the

present day in Brittany and Quebec there grew up the doubters. Weak at first, and as in the case of Descartes not daring openly to deny ecclesiastical doctrines that conflicted with their own theory, and perhaps at all times mostly composed of these whose indifference to all but gaiety and enjoyment did not compel them to quit the established creed, this party, unconscious of being a party, had a very direct connection with the school of philosophic doubt that in the eighteenth century owned Voltaire for its master mind.

In Germany, the renascence was swamped by the religious reformation and the dissensions it induced. In Holland, slowly emerging from the struggle for existence, the fierceness of the contest produced a marriage of convenience between the two forces-the only instance in Europe at that time of two such incompatible partners being linked together in a mutual toleration.

Spain.

In Spain, where the dead hand of the Inquisition crushed all freedom of thought, there was still art and music, and romance and beauty and faith, while the theatre The Internal under Calderon and Lope de Vega rose to a Condition of magnificence that was only equalled in England. Cervantes has left us a perfect picture of his country, and in the glorious history of Don Quixote the life of Spain passes before us as though we ourselves had lived at La Mancha by the side of that pattern knight. One sees the grandees in their pride, the Moriscoes and their love for their native land, the high carriage of the old Christian,' the all-pervading Inquisition, the ballad-loving people still singing of the defeat of the French at Roncesvalles, the hill banditti, the pirates at sea, the travelling actors with puppet players and dancing apes, the company assembled at inns, the host sometimes eating with his guests, the proverbs of the country of which Sancho had such an inexhaustible stock, the traffic and riches of the Indies, the slave trade and shipping of negroes, and the wages of the common people, Sancho receiving his two ducats a

month and food as a farm labourer, his daughter Sanchica earning her eight maravedi a day by making bone-lace, the painter with his two ducats for painting the king's arms on the gate of the city hall. . . .

But the fair flower of Spanish progress was killed by the Inquisition and the false ideas of honour and chivalry that had spread through the land. As all inducement to philosophy and thought was repressed, philosophy and thought themselves died out; and in the catalogue of great men who have influenced the higher life of Europe, we look in vain for the name of a Spaniard.

It may seem, at first sight, that the intellectual condition of a nation has little bearing on the part it plays in the politics of the world. The defeat of the Spanish Armada would probably not have been avoided had Medina Sidonia been an ardent Calvinist and Drake a believer in transubstantiation. But in fact the mental efficiency of a people has a very direct relation to the forces they are able to bring to an international struggle. It was not merely a coincidence that Greece produced no masters under the Roman rule, that Roman literature died as the empire sank into ineptitude, that Italian literature flourished with Italian commerce, and that both fell from their supremacy together. It is no fanciful connection that one traces between the reception given by the different countries of Europe to the renascence, and the forces they were able to bring to that great contest for the mastery of the world which began with the third great event that marks the close of the Middle Ages-the discovery of America and the new route to India.

The External

Of those discoveries Spain and Portugal had obtained almost the monopoly; and that monopoly was secured them by the papal bull. In Europe itself, the possesSplendour of sions of the King of Spain were considerable; Spain. when he succeeded in uniting Spain and Portugal he seemed irresistible. Champion of the Catholic faith