the soldiery by
whose help they had triumphed. The Roman colonies were thus not merely
valuable as _propugnacula_ of the state, as permanent supports to Roman
garrisons and armies, but they proved a most effective means of
extending over wide bounds the language and the laws of Rome, and of
inoculating the inhabitants of the provinces with more than the
rudiments of Roman civilization.

The occupation of the fairest provinces of the Roman empire by the
northern barbarians had little in common with colonization. The Germanic
invaders came from no settled state; they maintained loosely, and but
for a short while, any form of brotherhood with the allied tribes. A
nearer parallel to Greek colonization may be found in Iceland, whither
the adherents of the old Norse polity fled from the usurpation of Harold
Haarfager; and the early history of the English pale in Ireland shows,
though not in orderliness and prosperity, several points of resemblance
to the Roman colonial system.

Though both Genoese and Venetians in their day of power planted numerous
trading posts on various portions of the Mediterranean shores, of which
some almost deserve the name of colonies, the history of modern
colonization on a great scale opens with the Spanish conquests in
America. The first Spanish adventurers came, not to colonize, but to
satisfy as rapidly as possible and by the labour of the enslaved
aborigines, their thirst for silver and gold. Their conquests were
rapid, but the extension of their permanent settlements was gradual and
slow. The terrible cruelty at first exercised on the natives was
restrained, not merely by the zeal of the missionaries, but by effective
official measures; and ultimately home-born Spaniards and Creoles lived
on terms of comparative fairness with the Indians and with the
half-breed population. Till the general and successful revolt of her
American colonies, Spain maintained and employed the latter directly and
solely for what she conceived to be her own advantage. Her commercial
policy was one of most irrational and intolerable restriction and
repression; and till the end of Spanish rule on the American continent,
the whole political power was retained by the court at Madrid, and
administered in the colonies by an oligarchy of home-bred Spaniards.

The Portuguese colonization in America, in most respects resembling that
of Spain, is remarkable for the development there given to an
institution sadly prominent in