uences. From the time of its discovery, the Spanish
government pushed forward its settlements in America, not only with
vigor, but with eagerness; so that long before the first permanent
English settlement had been accomplished in what is now the United
States, Spain had conquered Mexico, Peru, and Chili, and stretched her
power over nearly all the territory she ever acquired on this continent.
The rapidity of these conquests is to be ascribed in a great degree to
the eagerness, not to say the rapacity, of those numerous bands of
adventurers, who were stimulated by individual interests and private
hopes to subdue immense regions, and take possession of them in the name
of the crown of Spain. The mines of gold and silver were the incitements
to these efforts, and accordingly settlements were generally made, and
Spanish authority established immediately on the subjugation of
territory, that the native population might be set to work by their new
Spanish masters in the mines. From these facts, the love of gold--gold,
not produced by industry, nor accumulated by commerce, but gold dug from
its native bed in the bowels of the earth, and that earth ravished from
its rightful possessors by every possible degree of enormity, cruelty,
and crime--was long the governing passion in Spanish wars and Spanish
settlements in America. Even Columbus himself did not wholly escape the
influence of this base motive. In his early voyages we find him passing
from island to island, inquiring everywhere for gold; as if God had
opened the New World to the knowledge of the Old, only to gratify a
passion equally senseless and sordid, and to offer up millions of an
unoffending race of men to the destruction of the sword, sharpened both
by cruelty and rapacity. And yet Columbus was far above his age and
country. Enthusiastic, indeed, but sober, religious, and magnanimous;
born to great things and capable of high sentiments, as his noble
discourse before Ferdinand and Isabella, as well as the whole history of
his life, shows. Probably he sacrificed much to the known sentiments of
others, and addressed to his followers motives likely to influence them.
At the same time, it is evident that he himself looked upon the world
which he discovered as a world of wealth, all ready to be seized and
enjoyed.

The conquerors and the European settlers of Spanish America were mainly
military commanders and common soldiers. The monarchy of Spain was not
transferred