Page:C. Cunningham- "The Institutional Background of Spanish American History".djvu/16

 monopoly, which could only thrive on a non-competitive basis, and which left the individual merchant as helpless in the eighteenth century as he had been in the sixteenth. But the bars had to be let down ultimately, and an age of free trade was ushered in. Spain could not compete with the merchants of Holland, England, and France, whose superiority consisted in individual efficiency and co-operative organizing-power. Spain adhered to her antiquated commercial laws and practices, because they had succeeded in a former age. She was incapable of readjusting her system and this unprogressiveness and its consequences cost her an empire.

The period from the eighth to the sixteenth century may be considered, therefore, as the schooling time of Spain in colonial administration. It was during this epoch that she received the training which fitted her to assume within a short space of time the management and government of a vast colonial empire. The problem of controlling her frontier provinces prepared her to govern exterior possessions and though the latter were actually further away than her own frontiers, the problem of government was but little different, and the matter of readjustment was a comparatively easy one. The adelantados became colonial governors and captains-general; municipalities were established in the distant colonies; subsequently the institution of the audiencia was transferred to the colonies with powers adjusted to the new problems; the ecclesiastical machinery was also transplanted, with the same relationship prevailing between it and the civil government as had existed in Spain. Above and over all, the Council of the Indies exercised supreme jurisdiction, and all the powers of civil and ecclesiastical administration were centered in this tribunal. 2em