rant injustice as seems ridiculous now;
but, at all events, Spain sent him who gave his name to the New World.

Columbus did little beyond finding America, which was indeed glory
enough for one life. But of the gallant nation which made possible his
discovery there were not lacking heroes to carry out the work which that
discovery opened. It was a century before Anglo-Saxons seemed to waken
enough to learn that there really _was_ a New World, and into that
century the flower of Spain crowded marvels of achievement. She was the
only European nation that did not drowse. Her mailed explorers overran
Mexico and Peru, grasped their incalculable riches, and made those
kingdoms inalienable parts of Spain. Cortez had conquered and was
colonizing a savage country a dozen times as large as England years
before the first English-speaking expedition had ever seen the mere
coast where it was to plant colonies in the New World; and Pizarro did a
still greater work. Ponce de Leon had taken possession for Spain of what
is now one of the States of our Union a generation before any of those
regions were seen by Saxons. That first traveller in North America,
Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, had walked his unparalleled way across the
continent from Florida to the Gulf of California half a century before
the first foot of our ancestors touched our soil. Jamestown, the first
English settlement in America, was not founded until 1607, and by that
time the Spanish were permanently established in Florida and New Mexico,
and absolute masters of a vast territory to the south. They had already
discovered, conquered, and partly colonized _inland_ America from
northeastern Kansas to Buenos Ayres, and from ocean to ocean. Half of
the United States, all Mexico, Yucatan, Central America, Venezuela,
Ecuador, Bolivia, Paraguay, Peru, Chile, New Granada, and a huge area
besides, were Spanish by the time England had acquired a few acres on
the nearest edge of America. Language could scarcely overstate the
enormous precedence of Spain over all other nations in the pioneering of
the New World. They were Spaniards who first saw and explored the
greatest gulf in the world; Spaniards who discovered the two greatest
rivers; Spaniards who found the greatest ocean; Spaniards who first knew
that there were two continents of America; Spaniards who first went
round the world! They were Spaniards who had carved their way into the
far interior of our own land, as well as of a