eeble hands,--the evacuation of
Havana, with its sorry pomp of exhuming Columbus's dust, is one of the
saddest sights history has called men to look upon. Columbus, a
foreigner, gave Spain a New World; and foreigners of still another
blood have taken away what by right never belonged to Spanish
sovereignty. Just as this fate is, we can but feel the immense pathos
of the Spanish evacuation of the New World. French discoverers hugged
the rivers, as by some deep affinity. Spaniards, conversely, made
march without thought of riverways. They were accustomed to deserts in
their own land, and feared them not in a remote hemisphere. They
swarmed in the desert. Nothing daunted them. Spain's best blood
poured into the New World, a fact which doubtless accounts, in part,
for the devitalized energies and genius of this mother country of their
birth and hopes and initiative. "Florida" is a Spanish tide-mark.
"St. Augustine" is a gravestone of history, marking the mound where
lies the dust of the first permanent colony planted in America. The
Spaniard headed toward the southern provinces of America, as the
Englishman to the east, and the Frenchman to the north and central
provinces. Spain held southward. Though the colony of Florida was
retained till, in the year 1819, the subtle diplomacy of John Quincy
Adams added this peninsula of flowers to the Union of States, it had no
aggressive value as a basis of discovery or colonization. The base of
Spanish operations was Mexico, the fair land of their conquest. Spain
exploited her energies in Mexico and Peru. She was mad with a lust for
gold. Her galleons made these lands bankrupt. But Spaniards dared to
lose themselves in desert or forests. The discovery and conquest of
Peru is mad with turbulent courage and adventure. This we can not
deny; and the discovery of the Amazon by a brother of Pizarro is a
story to thrill a sluggard into a sleepless waking. We see these
heroic days, and forgive much of Spanish misrule and avarice. De Soto,
crowding through jungles of undergrowth and miasms, through tribes of
hostile men, though stimulated by the wild lust for gold, is for all a
brave chapter in the world's biography; and to see him buried in the
massive river he discovered is to make other than the tender-hearted
weep. To see on the map of the Union "Llano Estacado" is to give, as
it were, the initials of heroic names. Spain, which staked these
plains, will walk across th