ll to the south, and
founded their cities a thousand miles inland long before the first
Anglo-Saxon came to the Atlantic seaboard. That early Spanish spirit of
_finding out_ was fairly superhuman. Why, a poor Spanish lieutenant with
twenty soldiers pierced an unspeakable desert and looked down upon the
greatest natural wonder of America or of the world--the Grand Canyon of
the Colorado--three full centuries before any "American" eyes saw it!
And so it was from Colorado to Cape Horn. Heroic, impetuous, imprudent
Balboa had walked that awful walk across the Isthmus, and found the
Pacific Ocean, and built on its shores the first ships that were ever
made in the Americas, and sailed that unknown sea, and had been dead
more than half a century before Drake and Hawkins saw it.

England's lack of means, the demoralization following the Wars of the
Roses, and religious dissensions were the chief causes of her torpidity
then. When her sons came at last to the eastern verge of the New World
they made a brave record; but they were never called upon to face such
inconceivable hardships, such endless dangers as the Spaniards had
faced. The wilderness they conquered was savage enough, truly, but
fertile, well wooded, well watered, and full of game; while that which
the Spaniards tamed was such a frightful desert as no human conquest
ever overran before or since, and peopled by a host of savage tribes to
some of whom the petty warriors of King Philip were no more to be
compared than a fox to a panther. The Apaches and the Araucanians would
perhaps have been no more than other Indians had they been transferred
to Massachusetts; but in their own grim domains they were the deadliest
savages that Europeans ever encountered. For a century of Indian wars in
the east there were three centuries and a half in the southwest. In one
Spanish colony (in Bolivia) as many were slain by the savages in one
massacre as there were people in New York city when the war of the
Revolution began! If the Indians in the east had wiped out twenty-two
thousand settlers in one red slaughter, as did those at Sorata, it would
have been well up in the eighteen-hundreds before the depleted colonies
could have untied the uncomfortable apron-strings of the mother
country, and begun national housekeeping on their own account.

When you know that the greatest of English text-books has not even the
name of the man who first sailed around the world (a Spaniard), nor of
th