. The Latin of the Sixteenth
century was a recrudescence of the Roman of the First. He had not, like
the Mongolian, lived long enough to become a stoic. He was mainly a
cynic and an adventurer. Thence he flowered into a sybarite. Coming
to great wealth with the discoveries of Columbus and the conquests of
Pizarro and Cortes, he proceeded to enjoy its fruits according to his
fancy and the fashion of the times.

He erected massive shrines to his deities. He reared noble palaces. He
built about his cathedrals and his castles what were then thought to be
great cities, walled and fortified. He was, for all his self-sufficiency
and pride, short-sighted; and yet, until they arrived, how could he
foresee the developments of artillery? They were as hidden from him as
three centuries later the wonders of electricity were hidden from us.

I was never a Free Trader. I stood for a tariff for revenue as the least
oppressive and safest support of Government. The protective system in
the United States, responsible for our unequal distribution of wealth,
took at least its name from Spain, and the Robber Barons, as I used to
call the Protectionists of Pennsylvania, were not of immediate German
origin.

Truth to say, both on land and water Spain has made a deal of history,
and the front betwixt Gibraltar and the Isle of San Fernando--Tangier on
one side and the Straits of Tarifa on the other--Cape Trafalgar, where
Nelson fought the famous battle, midway between them--has had its share.

Tarifa! What memories it invokes! In the olden and golden days of
primitive man, before corporation lawyers had learned how to frame
pillaging statutes, and rascally politicians to bamboozle confiding
constituencies--thus I used to put it--the gentle pirates of Tarifa laid
broad and deep the foundations for the Protective System in the United
States.

It was a fruitful as well as a congenial theme, and I rang all the
changes on it. To take by law from one man what is his and give it to
another man who has not earned it and has no right to it, I showed to be
an invention of the Moors, copied by the Spaniards and elevated thence
into political economy by the Americans. Tarifa took its name from
Tarif-Ben-Malik, the most enterprising Robber Baron of his day, and thus
the Lords of Tarifa were the progenitors of the Robber Barons of the
Black Forest, New England and Pittsburgh. Tribute was the name the Moors
gave their robbery, which was open and aboveboar