The Buccaneers in the West Indies in the XVII Century | Page 3

and administrative
side, presents a curious contrast. On the one hand we see the Spanish
Crown, with high ideals of order and justice, of religious and political
unity, extending to its ultramarine possessions its faith, its language, its
laws and its administration; providing for the welfare of the aborigines
with paternal solicitude; endeavouring to restrain and temper the
passions of the conquerors; building churches and founding schools
and monasteries; in a word, trying to make its colonies an integral part
of the Spanish monarchy, "une société vieille dans une contrée neuve."
Some Spanish writers, it is true, have exaggerated the virtues of their
old colonial system; yet that system had excellences which we cannot
afford to despise. If the Spanish kings had not choked their government
with procrastination and routine; if they had only taken their task a bit

less seriously and had not tried to apply too strictly to an empty
continent the paternal administration of an older country; we might
have been privileged to witness the development and operation of as
complete and benign a system of colonial government as has been
devised in modern times. The public initiative of the Spanish
government, and the care with which it selected its colonists, compare
very favourably with the opportunism of the English and the French,
who colonized by chance private activity and sent the worst elements of
their population, criminals and vagabonds, to people their new
settlements across the sea. However much we may deprecate the
treatment of the Indians by the conquistadores, we must not forget that
the greater part of the population of Spanish America to-day is still
Indian, and that no other colonizing people have succeeded like the
Spaniards in assimilating and civilizing the natives. The code of laws
which the Spaniards gradually evolved for the rule of their transmarine
provinces, was, in spite of defects which are visible only to the larger
experience of the present day, one of the wisest, most humane and best
co-ordinated of any to this day published for any colony. Although the
Spaniards had to deal with a large population of barbarous natives, the
word "conquest" was suppressed in legislation as ill-sounding,
"because the peace is to be sealed," they said, "not with the sound of
arms, but with charity and good-will."[3]
The actual results, however, of the social policy of the Spanish kings
fell far below the ideals they had set for themselves. The monarchic
spirit of the crown was so strong that it crushed every healthy,
expansive tendency in the new countries. It burdened the colonies with
a numerous, privileged nobility, who congregated mostly in the larger
towns and set to the rest of the colonists a pernicious example of
idleness and luxury. In its zeal for the propagation of the Faith, the
Crown constituted a powerfully endowed Church, which, while it did
splendid service in converting and civilizing the natives, engrossed
much of the land in the form of mainmort, and filled the new world
with thousands of idle, unproductive, and often licentious friars. With
an innate distrust and fear of individual initiative, it gave virtual
omnipotence to royal officials and excluded all creoles from public
employment. In this fashion was transferred to America the crushing

political and ecclesiastical absolutism of the mother country.
Self-reliance and independence of thought or action on the part of the
creoles was discouraged, divisions and factions among them were
encouraged and educational opportunities restricted, and the
American-born Spaniards gradually sank into idleness and lethargy,
indifferent to all but childish honours and distinctions and petty local
jealousies. To make matters worse, many of the Spaniards who crossed
the seas to the American colonies came not to colonize, not to trade or
cultivate the soil, so much as to extract from the natives a tribute of
gold and silver. The Indians, instead of being protected and civilized,
were only too often reduced to serfdom and confined to a laborious
routine for which they had neither the aptitude nor the strength; while
the government at home was too distant to interfere effectively in their
behalf. Driven by cruel taskmasters they died by thousands from
exhaustion and despair, and in some places entirely disappeared.
The Crown of Castile, moreover, in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries sought to extend Spanish commerce and monopolize all the
treasure of the Indies by means of a rigid and complicated commercial
system. Yet in the end it saw the trade of the New World pass into the
hands of its rivals, its own marine reduced to a shadow of its former
strength, its crews and its vessels supplied by merchants from foreign
lands, and its riches diverted at their very source.
This Spanish commercial system was based upon two distinct
principles. One was the principle of colonial exclusivism, according to
which all