Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Slavery volume 5 .djvu/259

Rh by the Old World, well endowed with. Art and Science, and the hoarded wealth of experience, wed America, rich only in her gifts from nature and her hopes in time. The three most valuable contributions Spain has made to mankind are the Consolato del mare, the Barcelonian bud whence modern mercantile law has slowly blossomed forth; the three scant ships a wealthy nation furnished to the Genoese navigator whom the world’s instinct pushed Westward in quest of continents; and Bon Quixote, a masterly satire on a form of folly then old-fashioned and fast getting extinct. These are the chief contributions Spain has dropped into the almsbox of the world. Coarse olives, huge onions, strong red wine—these are the offerings of the Spanish mind in the world^s fair of modern times. Since the days of Seneca and Lucan, perhaps Servetus is her foremost man, fantastic-minded yet rich in germs of fertile thought. Moorish and Hebrew greatness has indeed been cradled on her soil, but thereof Spain was not the mother.

Long before the Anglo-Saxons, the Spaniard came to America; greedy of money, hungering for reputation—the glory of the Gascon stock. He brought the proud but thin and sickly blood of a decaying tribe; the traditionary institutions of the past—Theocracy, Monarchy, Aristocracy, Despotocracy, the dominion of the master over the exploitered slave. He brought the mass-book and legends of unnatural saints,—the symbols of superstition and ecclesiastic tyranny; the sword,—the last argument of Spanish kings, the symbol of military depotism; fetters and the bloodhound. He brought no great ideas, new trees started in the old nursery of the past; no noble sentiments, the seed-corn of ideal harvests yet to be. He shared only the material momentum of the human race which dashed his Eastern body on the Western world. He butchered the Indians who disbelieved "the immaculate conception of our blessed Lady" as taught by men of most Titanic, all-devouring lust. He set up the Inquisition, and soon had monks and nuns believing what heathen Guatemozin would have found bitterer than fire. The Spaniard attempted to found no institution which was an improvement on what he left behind—he reproduced only the Church, the State, the