unenlightened government produced in them an incapacity to use
their newly won freedom, and condemned these lands to a long
period of anarchy. It would be too strong to say that it would
have been better had the Spaniards never come to America; for,
when all is said, they have done more than any other people, save
the British, to plant European modes of life in the non-European
world. But it is undeniable that their dominion afforded a far
from happy illustration of the working of Western civilisation in
a new field, and exercised a very unfortunate reaction upon the
life of the mother-country.

The conquest of Portugal and her empire by Philip II., in 1580,
turned Spain into a Colossus bestriding the world, and it was
inevitable that this world-dominion should be challenged by the
other European states which faced upon the Atlantic. The challenge
was taken up by three nations, the English, the French, and the
Dutch, all the more readily because the very existence of all
three and the religion of two of them were threatened by the
apparently overwhelming strength of Spain in Europe. As in so many
later instances, the European conflict was inevitably extended to
the non-European world. From the middle of the sixteenth century
onwards these three peoples attempted, with increasing daring, to
circumvent or to undermine the Spanish power, and to invade the
sources of the wealth which made it dangerous to them; but the
attempt, so far as it was made on the seas and beyond them, was in
the main, and for a long time, due to the spontaneous energies of
volunteers, not to the action of governments. Francis I. of France
sent out the Venetian Verazzano to explore the American shores of
the North Atlantic, as Henry VII. of England had earlier sent the
Genoese Cabots. But nothing came of these official enterprises.