e man who discovered Brazil (a Spaniard), nor of him who discovered
California (a Spaniard), nor of those Spaniards who first found and
colonized in what is now the United States, and that it has a hundred
other omissions as glaring, and a hundred histories as untrue as the
omissions are inexcusable, you will understand that it is high time we
should do better justice than did our fathers to a subject which should
be of the first interest to all real Americans.

The Spanish were not only the first conquerors of the New World, and its
first colonizers, but also its first civilizers. They built the first
cities, opened the first churches, schools, and universities; brought
the first printing-presses, made the first books; wrote the first
dictionaries, histories, and geographies, and brought the first
missionaries; and before New England had a real newspaper, Mexico had a
seventeenth-century attempt at one!

One of the wonderful things about this Spanish pioneering--almost as
remarkable as the pioneering itself--was the humane and progressive
spirit which marked it from first to last. Histories of the sort long
current speak of that hero-nation as cruel to the Indians; but, in
truth, the record of Spain in that respect puts us to the blush. The
legislation of Spain in behalf of the Indians everywhere was
incomparably more extensive, more comprehensive, more systematic, and
more humane than that of Great Britain, the Colonies, and the present
United States all combined. Those first teachers gave the Spanish
language and Christian faith to a thousand aborigines, where we gave a
new language and religion to one. There have been Spanish schools for
Indians in America since 1524. By 1575--nearly a century before there
was a printing-press in English America--many books in _twelve_
different Indian languages had been printed in the city of Mexico,
whereas in our history John Eliot's Indian Bible stands alone; and three
Spanish universities in America were nearly rounding out their century
when Harvard was founded. A surprisingly large proportion of the
pioneers of America were college men; and intelligence went hand in hand
with heroism in the early settlement of the New World.

II.

A MUDDLED GEOGRAPHY.

The least of the difficulties which beset the finders of the New World
was the then tremendous voyage to reach it. Had that three thousand
miles of unknown sea been the chief obstacle, civilization would have
over