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 5o8 E. P. Cheyney Portuguese pass, no coast ruler could make a treaty antagonistic to Portugal, and all the most profitable commerce was in her hands. A Portuguese viceroy ruled at Goa, and two governors with stations at Mozambique in the west and Malacca in the east were given the oversight of the outlying parts of these 15,000 miles of coast do- minion. Every year a fleet averaging twenty sail passed around the Cape of Good Hope between Portugal and her eastern do- minions, its great galleons, caravels, and carracks loaded with the most valuable articles of commerce. Lisbon became a great com- mercial centre and Portugal enjoyed a period of unwonted intel- lectual, economic, and international prominence. Her king along with his other titles called himself " Lord of the Conquest, Navi- gation, and Commerce of Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia, and India." The construction by Spain in the latest years of the fifteenth and the early years of the sixteenth century of a still more ex- tended, more powerful, and more profitable empire in the West is an even more impressive if also more familiar story. By some such date as 1540 the conqiiistadorcs had explored and largely sub- jugated a great part of the island and continental regions of Amer- ica south of what is now the United States. This dominion had been organized under the systematic administration of the Council of the Indies and the Casa de Contratacion in Spain and of two viceroyalties with a number of subordinate governments in America. Certain municipal institutions had been established and constant communication took place with the home government. The vast geographical extent of the Spanish dominions in the New World, with a Spanish-born population of perhaps 150,000 and native-born of possibly 5,000,000 ; the productivity of the silver and gold-mines, unexampled before in human history ; the size of the fleets carrying between Spain and the Indies emigrants, military and civil officials, troops, bullion, European and American goods, and all the inter- change of two parts of an advanced empire; the reaction of these things on the importance of the mother-country in Europe — all these, like the East-Indian empire of Portugal, had grown prac- tically to maturity by the middle of the sixteenth century, long before England had established her first colony. We know that the existence of these imposing political structures exercised a powerful influence on the thought of Englishmen. It was not merely that they had a natural human interest in the newly- discovered lands, with their savage men, new animal and vegetable productions, and peculiarities of climate and physical conformation ; nor was it merely that the mystery, the glamor, and the romance of the distant and the unknown touched poetic imaginations amongst