The Spanish Conquest in America (Volume 2) (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text, images, or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1902. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... BOOK IX LAS CASAS CHAPTER I ADMINISTRATION OF THE FLEMINGS EMIGRATION SCHEME OF LAS CASAS LICENCE TO IMPORT NEGROES NEW SCHEME OF LAS CASAS FOR COLONIZATION THE KING'S PREACHERS 'I 'HE life of a state has often been compared to that -*- of an individual: indeed, the same terms are in common language habitually applied to both. We speak of the youth and the old age, the vigour and the decay, the growth or the torpidity, of one as of the other. But, in truth, such is the richness of Creation, that no two great things are found to be very much alike, when you come to examine them deeply; and most similes, even those of a prosaic kind, belong to the realms of fiction, and are but pleasantries, with which men beguile themselves and educate their imaginations. The most striking fact about the life of an individual is its terrible continuity. To others this may not be so clear, but to the man himself it is fatally so. Considerable, and outwardly abrupt, events take place in a man's life; but they do not surprize him much, and they never interrupt his sense of the continuity of his being. Hence the inevitable remarks of the aged, that all life is but a dream, and that their youth seems to them but as yesterday. Madness may produce an apparent pause, but sanity knows nothing of the kind. In the life of a state it is quite different. That being an aggregate, or rather a compound, of individual lives, is liable to great abruptness; and changes take place in it, compared with which, anything that occurs in the life of an individual is in no respect commensurate. In this history we have now come to one of those signal and abrupt changes which affect the lives of states. How changed is the government of Spain in the brief interval that has elapsed from the discovery ...