his soul-one, too, of which it was not fit to speak; a state of things impossible in the case of a wedded wife-the wife of a viceroy entitled to figure as vice-queen in the Indies, as later Diego's wife did.

4. The pains taken by Columbus to describe Beatrice as "the mother of Don Ferdinand, my son," and as "a person for whom I have so much regard," and about whom his conscience had troubled him greatly, shows that he was saying and doing all that he could on her behalf and in recognition of her, and that the facts alone, in this hour of long-delayed atonement for a great wrong, prevented his avowing her to have been his wife.

5. The Historie, commonly accepted as wholly or in part the work of the son, Don Ferdinand, specially mentions the marriage of which his older brother was the fruit, but has no mention of any marriage of his mother, -a failure impossible, not only to such a son, but in a work which is the chief source of personal details and circumstances in the life of Columbus.

6. Beatrice Enriquez was still alive, in 1523, when Diego Columbus made his will, and recognized her claim to certain payments, yet she had never stood forth as a wife of the discoverer, nor did the will of Diego, the latest attempt of the family to give her her due, so recognize

Unless all the evidence of history is disregarded, Columbus made her a mother, but not a wife.

But whatever may be the error of history, as it now clearly stands, in the matter of the mother of Ferdinand, feminine flutter among the facts of what Columbus was and what he did cannot remake history. There is no reason whatever for imagining that we could see Columbus more favorably if we had more light. There is but too much light for those that have eyes to see, and in the not yet translated parts of Las Casas, there is enough more to put a brand of eternal infamy on the Italian adventurer, who enslaved and slaughtered the natives of the islands discovered by him as recklessly, and exterminated them in vast numbers as ruthlessly, as if they had been so many field-vermin.

The presumption that Columbus "must. have been a great and good man," and that those who see otherwise are detractors, has nothing whatever to go upon, save emotion and ignorance. The as

sumption even that we owe our America to Columbus; that his work was unique; and that he gave continental gifts, vastly beneficent, to mankind, is wholly without foundation.

The Portuguese discovery of the continental lands afterward embraced in Brazil came in the year 1500, wholly apart from anything attempted or effected by Columbus, and in sequel to Portuguese successes filling the whole period from 1418 to the end of the century; and not only was European knowledge of a "New World," and the naming of it "America," due to this Portuguese success, and not at all due to the discoveries of islands by Columbus, which he falsely pretended to identify with India "beyond the Ganges," but for every interest of humanity, and most of all for the new world, Mr. Adams justly said that Columbus did not make a desirable success. The attempt to put upon scholars like Winsor, and Poole, and Kendall Adams, the stigma of raging iconoclasm, is pure sputter.

I11-Advised

A lady of some distincColumbus-Worship tion as a lecturer to ladies, Miss Jane Meade Welch, in an address several times repeated, announced, in the interest of feminine Columbusworship, her approval of Irving's Columbus, and her adverse judgment upon the more scholarly, more honest, and more truthful work of Justin Winsor. The extravagance of the Columbus cult found voice in Miss Welch to this effect:

"Columbus was the man of a time more momentous than any since the star shone over Bethlehem. It was an age of discovery in scientific thinking. A new continent was opening in the mental world as vast as that discovered by Columbus. He did what any man could have done, but which no man would have done had not Columbus done it. For centuries the Orient had been the dream of the philosopher and the goal of adventurers. Until 1492 Europe stood with her back to the Atlantic. Stronger grew the hopes that clustered about the East. The idea of sailing due west to the Indies took possession of Columbus. As he walked the streets of Córdova and Seville, his countenance aglow with hope or clouded with despair, there was a look of indefinable authority that marks genius. There has been no movement in the history of the universe more momentous than that when Columbus paced his decks."

The facts do not justify these touches of oratorical imagination. Not only was Columbus not the man of the time, but the time would have been better without

him. The star of opposition to Bethlehem rose over his life of greed, falsehood, crime and failure. He had no part whatever in the scientific thinking of the time. The vast mental world opening to purer eyes than his, he never so much as suspected the existence of. He did not discover, and never pretended to have discovered, a new continent. That discovery was made apart from him, and would have been better made without him. It is not true that until 1492 Europe had stood with her back to the Atlantic. The Orient had not been a mere dream. The idea of sailing to it due west was a crazy mistake compared with the ideas which carried abler navigators and better men to the real India.

We have given already (SELF CULTURE for Angust, pp. 243-245) proof of the fact that to Prince Henry of Portugal belongs the honor commonly given to Columbus.

Of genius for any high task Columbus had none. The most sadly definable thing in him was the air, not of authority, but of pretension, which savored more of the crank than the scientist, and for great parts of his conduct and utterances suggests a mind almost or quite off its balance. The movement in hand when he "paced his decks" would have ended far better if he had gone down with his "crazy little ships," and his crazy scheme of westward greed, which was a seed of sin and shame without a parallel, through more than three centuries of Spanish lust for gain from the new world. The name of Christ was never taken with worse fraud in the intent, and wickedness more damning in the result, than in the "movement" which the vivacity of feminine oratory can compare with the coming of Christ in good will to men.

Justin Winsor's Mr. Winsor's admirable Treatment Lenient "Life of Columbus" left but one thing to be desired-a more exact sentence upon the criminal on trial in his honest and learned pages. One would think he made the path so plain that the wayfaring man, though a fool, need not err, as Scripture hath it; but Scripture even had no foresight of feminine brooms sweeping back the sea for a "man-deity."

The truth is that Mr. Winsor notably spares Columbus, and puts into the picture touches which concede to the popular conception somewhat more than the

severest regard for truth permits. When he says on his title-page, "Christopher Columbus, and How He Received and Imparted the Spirit of Discovery," the concession is most generous. The "Cristóval Colon," who took so much pains to get made thoroughly Spanish, did not receive, much less impart, the true Spirit of Discovery then aflame in the world; and what he did receive he misused.

It is more than just to recognize Columbus as "the conspicuous developer of a great world movement," and "the embodiment of the ripened aspirations of his time." This honor belongs elsewhere. Columbus embodied only a corrupt and degraded form of the aspirations which were the glory of the age of discovery, and the world-movement was conspicuously marred, damaged, and demoralized by the hand which he put upon it.

Numerous expressions naturally used by Mr. Winsor imply the conscious view in Columbus of a "New World," of "America"; when he no more had this than earlier discoverers of islands in the Atlantic had had it. And while Mr. Winsor sufficiently indicates all the unfavorable facts, he forbears express effort to press the case against Columbus and leaves this important feature of adequate treatment of the subject to the judgment of the reader; a task by no means easy to even the intelligent reader.

Columbus

The scandalous excess Unworthy of Honor of Columbus - worship into which emotion and ignorance swept press and pulpit and platform, in 1892-3, renders peculiarly necessary an adequate statement of the real case of Columbus in relation to America, and this necessarily becomes a statement against Columbus, who was a curse to America rather than a benefactor, and a miserable fraud, a wretched failure as a discoverer.

These are terribly hard words, to be true of the man who first sailed across the Atlantic in such a way as to insure a connection of transatlantic lands with Europe. But they are true words. It would have been incalculably better for America and for Europe, for civilization and for Christianity, if no more had come of the sailing of Columbus than came of the far earlier voyages and landings which make the Norse story of the real, original finding of the new world. That

people of English, of German, of Dutch, of French, of Italian stock, representing that America which means the United States, should, even for an hour of commemorative enthusiasm, make a demigod of Spanish "Cristóval Colon," who got himself made Spanish, and who stands in history for the worst Spanish spirit and ideas, affords a most deplorable example of misguided emotion. Italy, even, might prefer her Cabots in England and her Vespucius in Portugal to her Colon in Spain, if due account is taken of all the facts, from the first start of discovery to the end of four hundred years of America.

bus

II.

The Spanish Spirit It is of importance to Before Columunderstand the Spanish spirit and ideas, to the service of which Columbus gave himself. The Saracen conquest of Spain in 711 A.D., introduced an alien and hated race by the side of the Visigothic Christian conquerors of the earlier native population. The Arab victors brought in the Moors from Africa, adding Moorish industry to Arab learning. Toward the middle of the eleventh century, 1035-37, when the Moslem power in Spain was broken up into several independent principalities, there sprang up the two Christian principalities of Aragon and Castile. These put themselves in relation with the Papacy, and as time went on more and more overcame the Moslems, until, in a war unitedly waged by Castile and Aragon, from 1481 to 1492, the last hold of the alien race was broken. This alien race, the Moors, had represented learning and industry to a most remarkable degree, at the same time that Spanish Christianity most haughtily looked down upon them as at once aliens and heretics.

At the final overthrow of Moorish power in Spain, by the conquest of Granada in 1492, great liberties were conceded to the conquered for a short time. Then severe measures to convert them provoked a revolt in 1500 A. D., which was very harshly crushed out in 1502, and followed by most cruel oppression for more than a hundred years; Philip II., in 1566-70, taking measures to entirely suppress their habits, customs, and language, as well as their faith; and Philip III., in 1609, completing his father's work by an edict banishing all “Moriscos," as they were now called. The sequel to this is thus given:

"The edict was obeyed, but it was the ruin of Spain. The Moriscos were the backbone of manufactures, but also in agriculture. The the industrial population, not only in trade and haughty and indolent Spaniards had willingly left what they considered degrading employments to their inferiors. The Moors had introduced into Spain the cultivation of sugar, cotton, rice, and silk. They had established a system of irrigation which had given fertility to the soil. The province of Valencia, in their hands, had become a model of agriculture to the rest of Europe. In manufactures and commerce they had shown equal superiority to the Christian inhabitants, and many of the products of Spain were eagerly sought for by other countries. All these advantages were sacrificed to an insane desire for religious unity. The resources of Spain, already exhausted, never recovered from this terrible blow." (Encylopædia Britannica, Vol. XXII. 330.)

The combined hatred of heresy and of labor, which had taken fatal root in Spain at so early a period, was a curse to Spanish culture and power, in Europe and in America. Even with her immense activity and success in exploration and discovery in the new world, for seventy years of the sixteenth century, Spain undertook, in 1570, a crusade against European Protestantism, and a conflict with the Netherlands, which ended in Spanish overthrow in every quarter of the globe. Although possession of Portugal from 1580 to 1640 nearly doubled her power, and the new world was her monopoly, yet Spain lost on every hand. The Spanish Armada of 1588 was a magnificent disaster. Queen Elizabeth's captains swept the seas of both worlds. After war with England from 1585 to 1603, Philip III. signed, June 15, 1605, in the city where Columbus died, the treaty of peace which made North America predominantly English.

Spanish Auspices

the Worst in Europe

And it required no prophet to foresee that what Columbus gave Spain in South America carried in its worst form the fatal taint of the Spanish spirit. The degradation of labor, the enslavement of man, the crushing out of free mind, were chief notes of Spanish culture through ages of growing darkness and disaster. The marriage of Isabella and Ferdinand in 1469, followed by the unity of Spain in 1479, and the final extinction of Moorish power in 1492, brought in the greatest period of prosperity in Spanish history. At the same time an excessive rigor of Catholic orthodoxy inspired both king and queen. The Inquisition, constituted for the dual kingdom under Torquemada, in 1483, and forced upon Aragon against a popular feeling for liberty, was the foremost monument of their reign. In 1492 it carried out the most inhuman and impolitic expulsion of the Jews. And after Isabella and Ferdinand had laid the foundations,

Hapsburg rule, Charles V., and Philip I., built for evil and not for good, with the madness the gods are said to send on those they would destroy.

Columbus a

Low Type of Man

Columbus, in fact, took on a citizenship which was the worst in Europe, and accepted the most evil fates under the banner of Spain. He did this in a kinship of his own spirit to the Spanish spirit. Of fairly large natural intelligence and quick perception, he yet had emotion rather than intellect, imagination rather than judgment and knowledge, and enthusiasms, flaming and wandering, rather than convictions well based, and principles firmly held. A confident and determined visionary, indefinitely capable of self-deception and delusion, of pious fraud and pious falsehood, he found his place with Spain at her worst, and achieved a mission, perhaps the worst for failure in success and shame amid glory, in all human history.

N Boone's history of "Education in the United States,' which appeared in the "International Education Series," of which the sponsor is Dr. Wm. T. Harris, U. S. Commissioner of Education, and one of our best educational authorities, there are reproduced from a famous New England educator, Horace Mann, a number of errors strikingly illustrative of the imperfect state of historical knowledge when Mr. Mann wrote, and not yet properly amended. In the chapter on "Early New England Schools," Prof. Boone refers to Mr. Mann's Report on Education for 1846, a notably able document, in which, however, the failure of accurate historical light is conspicuous. In this report Mr. Mann said:

"The Pilgrim Fathers who colonized Massachusetts Bay, made a bolder innovation upon all pre-existing policy and usages than the world had ever known since the commencement of the Christian era. They adopted special and costly means to train up the whole body of the people to industry, to intelligence, to virtue and to independent thought.

In the transactions of a Boston public meeting, held on the 13th day of April, 1635, the following entry is found: Likewise it was then gen

erally agreed upon, that our brother, Philemon Purmont, shall be entreated to become schoolmaster for the teaching and nurturing of children with us.' . If, as is supposed, this word [nurturing], now obsolete in this connection, implied the disposition, and the power on the part of the teacher, as far as such an object can be accomplished by human instrumentality, to warm into birth, to foster into strength and to advance into precedence and predominance, all kindly sympathies toward men, all elevated thoughts respecting the duties and the destiny of life, and a supreme reverence for the character and attributes of the Creator, then, how many teachers have since been employed who have not nourished the children committed to their care! [The word is not nourished, but 'nourtered,' the old spelling of nurtured, and it has not become obsolete.]

"In 1642 the General Court of the colony, by a public act, enjoined upon the municipal authorities the duty of seeing that every child within their respective jurisdictions should be educated. Nor was the education which they contemplated either narrow or superficial. By the terms of the act, the selectmen of every town were required to have a vigilant eye over their brethren and neighbors; to see first that none of them shall suffer so much barbarism in any of their families, as not to endeavor to teach, by themselves or others, their children and apprentices, so much learning as may enable them perfectly to read the English tongue, and [obtain a] knowledge of the capital laws; upon penalty of twenty shillings for each neglect therein.' Such was the idea of 'barbarism' entertained by the colonists of Massachu

setts Bay more than two centuries ago. Tried by this standard, even at the present day, the regions of civilization become exceedingly narrow; and many a man, who now blindly glories in the name and in the prerogatives of a republican citizen would, according to the better ideas of the Pilgrim Fathers, be known only as the 'barbarian' father of 'barbarian' children."

Mr. Mann's statement went on to speak of what this alleged Massachusetts act of 1642 said about religious instruction, about an honest calling and fit labor for all children and apprentices, and about the steps the selectmen were to take to meet cases of neglect. But the actual act quoted is not one of 1642, and is not a Massachusetts act at all, but is the act of the Connecticut Colony, in the Connecticut code of 1650. At page 47, Prof. Boone cites the Connecticut law correctly, and at page 16 he cites the Massachusetts law of 1642 correctly, but on page 17 he borrows from Horace Mann the errors which refer the "barbarism," and other statements of the 1650 law of Connecticut, to the 1642 law of Massachusetts Bay.

A greater error still, which Prof. Boone repeats from Horace Mann, is that of referring Massachusetts Bay action and even Connecticut action, to the Pilgrim Fathers.

Not only do the only historical Pilgrim Fathers belong to Plymouth Colony alone, quite apart from the Puritan Fathers of Massachusetts Bay and of Connecticut, from Salem and Boston to Hartford and New Haven, but among all the discriminations and the distinctions known to the entire history of Englishspeaking culture, none can be traced more profound, more significant, more prophetic of the ideal of human progress, and notably of English culture in England and in America, than that which raised the Pilgrim ideal above the Puritan, and set the Pilgrim Fathers apart from the Puritan Fathers.

Failure to note the double fact that the Pilgrim Fathers were "Separatists," as contrasted with Puritans, and were "Liberal" Separatists as contrasted with other Independents, such as Roger Williams, has prevented writers otherwise of the highest character from making out correctly the facts of the most interesting chapter in the history of English-American culture. Scholars of the standing of Dr. George E. Ellis, Prof. Moses Coit Tyler, and Mr. John Fiske, are on rec

ord in works or the first importance, in utterly mistaken references to the Pilgrims of Plymouth, due to not discovering that they were not simply Puritans, and yet were not rigid Separatists. The Pilgrims looked out of the English Church, and conscientiously went out of it. They were branded as "Separatists" for doing this, and were by none more hotly branded and persecuted than by the Puritans. The two parties made terms with one another in America, and the little body of perhaps three hundred Pilgrim Fathers was soon lost to clear view under the shadow of Puritanism which fell from the great colony of Massachusetts Bay, where 21,000 Puritan Fathers set their standard, with its white ground crossed by heavy bars of black against the all clear white of the standard of the little Pilgrim band at Plymouth.

The original minister of the Pilgrims, at Leyden, in Holland, who had come with them out of England, and was their chief spirit, scholar, thinker, and statesman even, originally an ordained clergyman of the Church of England, the Rev. John Robinson, destined to be commemorated some day as of the kin of Shakespeare, and Wyckliffe, and Chaucer, and King Alfred, and a precursor of Dean Stanley and John Bright, and all the modern "sweetness and light," never came to America, but died in Holland, vainly waiting and longing to follow his flock to America, but unable to go because Puritan members of the London company which found money to aid the colony so bitterly opposed letting a "Separatist" minister have a chance, even with the church which he had created, had commissioned and inspired to their great experiment, and had not originally accompanied only because a minority formed the first emigration, and the majority kept back their pastor.

A "Separatist" minister of very little ability or standing got in with one of the earliest Puritan companies for Massachusetts Bay, but when it was known what he was, only the inhumanity of it prevented his being hustled off the vessel with his baggage; and he was, even so, allowed to come, only under a bond not to exercise his objectionable "Separatist" ministry within the limits of the Puritan settlement. He went to Plymouth, and, though a feeble candle amid the Pilgrim