Page:C. Cunningham- "The Institutional Background of Spanish American History".djvu/15

38 municipalities and the nobles exercised powers of local legislation. Subsequently the various councils and the cortés itself legislated for the king. With legislative and administrative bodies, local and provincial, already established, there was little opportunity and no real need for these judicial tribunals to assume the powers of legislation. But in the colonies it was otherwise. There were few towns, and those were widely separated; the audiencias were the sole institutions whose members had the requisite experience and ability to advise the governor in administrative affairs, or to assume the government in case of a vacancy. Once assumed, this power was not willingly ceded, especially when this well-selected and administratively efficient body of magistrates managed affairs better than a governor, captain-general, or viceroy, whose only preparation for office was military training and experience. So it came about that from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century a large number of extraordinary and unforeseen duties, governmental, administrative, and ecclesiastical, came to be the concern of the colonial audiencias, owing largely to the impossibility of referring matters to Spain and because the audiencias themselves were royal tribunals, composed of magistrates of rank, talent, education, administrative ability, and experience, who were better fitted to assume control than other authorities. this particular, it cannot be said that the colonial institutions were influenced by those of Spain.

The commercial machinery which Spain inaugurated in her colonies was never so successful as her political institutions. While preparing herself for colonial empire, in the period from 800 to 1500, she did not make corresponding progress economically. During the centuries of warfare against the Moors, Spain grew to honor the knight and the missionary and to scorn the merchant and the worker. Commerce, banking, and industry were left to the Jews, the Moors, and the Moriscoes. When these classes were expelled, the Spaniards remained practically without commercial experience, and they were unprepared to take the places of those driven out, either in trade or in production. It resulted, therefore, that their inaptitude in commercial matters had to be bolstered up and protected by a system of government