ed
these lands to a long period of anarchy. It would be too strong to say
that it would have been better had the Spaniards never come to America;
for, when all is said, they have done more than any other people, save
the British, to plant European modes of life in the non-European world.
But it is undeniable that their dominion afforded a far from happy
illustration of the working of Western civilisation in a new field, and
exercised a very unfortunate reaction upon the life of the
mother-country.

The conquest of Portugal and her empire by Philip II., in 1580, turned
Spain into a Colossus bestriding the world, and it was inevitable that
this world-dominion should be challenged by the other European states
which faced upon the Atlantic. The challenge was taken up by three
nations, the English, the French, and the Dutch, all the more readily
because the very existence of all three and the religion of two of them
were threatened by the apparently overwhelming strength of Spain in
Europe. As in so many later instances, the European conflict was
inevitably extended to the non-European world. From the middle of the
sixteenth century onwards these three peoples attempted, with
increasing daring, to circumvent or to undermine the Spanish power, and
to invade the sources of the wealth which made it dangerous to them;
but the attempt, so far as it was made on the seas and beyond them, was
in the main, and for a long time, due to the spontaneous energies of
volunteers, not to the action of governments. Francis I. of France sent
out the Venetian Verazzano to explore the American shores of the North
Atlantic, as Henry VII. of England had earlier sent the Genoese Cabots.
But nothing came of these official enterprises. More effective were the
pirate adventurers who preyed upon the commerce between Spain and her
possessions in the Netherlands as it passed through the Narrow Seas,
running the gauntlet of English, French, and Dutch. More effective
still were the attempts to find new routes to the East, not barred by
the Spanish dominions, by a north-east or a north-west passage; for
some of the earlier of these adventures led to fruitful unintended
consequences, as when the Englishman Chancellor, seeking for a
north-east passage, found the route to Archangel and opened up a trade
with Russia, or as when the Frenchman Cartier, seeking for a north-west
passage, hit upon the great estuary of the St. Lawrence, and marked out
a claim for Fr