gid forms to await only the inevitable process of stagnation and
decay. In her proudest hour an old soldier, who had lost one of his
hands fighting her battles against the Turk at Lepanto, employed the
other in writing the masterpiece of her literature, which is really
a caricature of the nation.

There is much in the career of Spain that calls to mind the dazzling
beauty of her "dark-glancing daughters," with its early bloom, its
startling--almost morbid--brilliance, and its premature decay. Rapid
and brilliant was her rise, gradual and inglorious her steady decline,
from the bright morning when the banners of Castile and Aragon were
flung triumphantly from the battlements of the Alhambra, to the short
summer, not so long gone, when at Cavite and Santiago with swift,
decisive havoc the last ragged remnants of the once world-dominating
power were blown into space and time, to hover disembodied there, a
lesson and a warning to future generations. Whatever her final place in
the records of mankind, whether as the pioneer of modern civilization
or the buccaneer of the nations or, as would seem most likely, a
goodly mixture of both, she has at least--with the exception only
of her great mother, Rome--furnished the most instructive lessons in
political pathology yet recorded, and the advice to students of world
progress to familiarize themselves with her history is even more apt
today than when it first issued from the encyclopedic mind of Macaulay
nearly a century ago. Hardly had she reached the zenith of her power
when the disintegration began, and one by one her brilliant conquests
dropped away, to leave her alone in her faded splendor, with naught but
her vaunting pride left, another "Niobe of nations." In the countries
more in contact with the trend of civilization and more susceptible
to revolutionary influences from the mother country this separation
came from within, while in the remoter parts the archaic and outgrown
system dragged along until a stronger force from without destroyed it.

Nowhere was the crystallization of form and principle more pronounced
than in religious life, which fastened upon the mother country a
deadening weight that hampered all progress, and in the colonies,
notably in the Philippines, virtually converted her government into
a hagiarchy that had its face toward the past and either could not
or would not move with the current of the times. So, when "the shot
heard round the world," the dec