ed for any colony. Although the Spaniards had to deal with a
large population of barbarous natives, the word "conquest" was
suppressed in legislation as ill-sounding, "because the peace is to be
sealed," they said, "not with the sound of arms, but with charity and
good-will."[3]

The actual results, however, of the social policy of the Spanish kings
fell far below the ideals they had set for themselves. The monarchic
spirit of the crown was so strong that it crushed every healthy,
expansive tendency in the new countries. It burdened the colonies with a
numerous, privileged nobility, who congregated mostly in the larger
towns and set to the rest of the colonists a pernicious example of
idleness and luxury. In its zeal for the propagation of the Faith, the
Crown constituted a powerfully endowed Church, which, while it did
splendid service in converting and civilizing the natives, engrossed
much of the land in the form of mainmort, and filled the new world with
thousands of idle, unproductive, and often licentious friars. With an
innate distrust and fear of individual initiative, it gave virtual
omnipotence to royal officials and excluded all creoles from public
employment. In this fashion was transferred to America the crushing
political and ecclesiastical absolutism of the mother country.
Self-reliance and independence of thought or action on the part of the
creoles was discouraged, divisions and factions among them were
encouraged and educational opportunities restricted, and the
American-born Spaniards gradually sank into idleness and lethargy,
indifferent to all but childish honours and distinctions and petty local
jealousies. To make matters worse, many of the Spaniards who crossed the
seas to the American colonies came not to colonize, not to trade or
cultivate the soil, so much as to extract from the natives a tribute of
gold and silver. The Indians, instead of being protected and civilized,
were only too often reduced to serfdom and confined to a laborious
routine for which they had neither the aptitude nor the strength; while
the government at home was too distant to interfere effectively in their
behalf. Driven by cruel taskmasters they died by thousands from
exhaustion and despair, and in some places entirely disappeared.

The Crown of Castile, moreover, in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries sought to extend Spanish commerce and monopolize all the
treasure of the Indies by means of a rigid and complicated