powers of growth, is one of the strangest coincidences in history.

Bending every energy for years to stay the tide of change and progress,
suppressing freedom of thought with relentless vigor, and quarantining
herself and her dependencies against new ideas, conservatism
grew to be her settled habit and the organs of government became
ossified. Policies of commercial restriction which were justifiable
or at least rationally explicable in the sixteenth century lasted on,
proof against innovation or improvement, until the eighteenth century
and later. Consequently from the middle of the seventeenth century at
the period of the rapid rise of colonial powers of France, Holland,
and England, the Spanish colonies find themselves under a commercial
regime which increasingly hampers their prosperity and effectually
blocks their advancement.

The contrast between the Spanish possessions and those of the other
maritime powers became more marked as time went on. The insuperable
conservatism of the home government gave little opportunity for the
development of a class of energetic and progressive colonial officials,
and financial corruption honeycombed the whole colonial civil service.

Such conditions: the absence of the spirit of progress, hostility to
new ideas, failure to develop resources, and the prevalence of bribery
and corruption in the civil service, insure abundant and emphatic
condemnation at the present day for the Spanish colonial system. But
in any survey of this system we must not lose sight of the terrible
costs of progress in the tropical colonies of Holland, France, and
England; nor fail to compare the _pueblos_ of the Philippines in the
eighteenth century with the plantations of San Domingo, or Jamaica,
or Java, or with those of Cuba in the early nineteenth century when