Mexico | Page 8

land, Spain
was in the throes of a great convulsion. The young Flemish prince had
been called to his great inheritance by the death of his grandfather,
Ferdinand the Catholic, and the incapacity of his Spanish mother,
Queen Juana. Charles had come to the country upon which, in a
financial sense, the burden of his future widespread empire was to
depend, with little understanding of the proud and ardent people over
whom he was to rule. He spoke no Spanish, and he was surrounded by
greedy Flemish courtiers dressed in outlandish garb, speaking in a
strange tongue, and looking upon the realm of their prince as a fat
pasture upon which, locust like, they might batten with impunity. The
Spaniards had frowned to see the great Cardinal Jimenez curtly
dismissed by the boy sovereign whose crown he had saved; they
clamoured indignantly when the Flemings cast themselves upon the
resources of Castile and claimed the best offices civil and ecclesiastical;
they sternly insisted upon the young king taking a solemn oath that

Spain in future should be for the Spaniards; and when tardily and
sulkily they voted supplies of money the grant was saddled with many
irritating conditions.
When the letter of Cortes arrived in Spain Charles was at close grips
with his outraged people, for he had broken all his promises to them.
Hurrying across the country to embark and claim the imperial crown of
Germany, vacant by the death of his grandfather Maximilian, eager for
the large sums of money he needed for his purpose, which Spain of all
his realms alone could provide, the sovereign was trampling upon the
dearly prized charters of his people. The great rising of the Castilian
commoners was finally crushed, thanks to class dissensions and the
diplomacy of the sovereign. Thenceforward the revenues of Castile
were at the mercy of the Emperor, whose needs for his world-wide
responsibilities were insatiable; and the Indies of the West, being the
appanage of the crown of Castile, were drained to uphold the claim of
Spain and its Emperor-King to dictate to Christendom the form and
doctrines of its religious faith. It is no wonder, therefore, that the
despatches of the obscure adventurer who announced to his sovereign
that, in spite of obstacles thrown in his way by highly placed royal
officials, he had conquered a vast civilised empire with a mere handful
of followers, were received sympathetically by the potentate to whom
the possession of fresh sources of revenue was so important. Cortes in
his various letters again and again claims the Emperor's patronage of
his bold defiance of the Emperor's officers on the ground that the latter
in their action were moved solely by considerations of their personal
gain, whereas he, Cortes, was striving to endow his sovereign with a
rich new empire and boundless treasure whilst carrying into the dark
pagan land, at the sword's point, the gentle creed of the Christian God.
Of this religious element of his expedition Cortes never lost sight; he
was licentious in his life, unscrupulous in his methods, and regardless
of the suffering he inflicted to attain his ends; but in this he was only a
son of his country and his time; such qualities might, and in fact did,
accompany the most devout personal piety and an exalted religious
ideal. That the imposition of Christian civilisation upon Mexico meant
the sacrifice in cold blood of countless thousands of inoffensive human

creatures was as nothing when once the legal forms had been complied
with and the people could be assumed to be recalcitrant or rebellious to
a decree of which they understood not a word. The awful holocaust of
natives which followed the Spanish advance, the enslavement of a
whole people to the demon of greed, especially after the withdrawal of
Cortes from the scene, left a bitter crop of estrangement between the
native Mexicans and their white masters, of which the rank remains
have not even yet been quite eradicated. Cortes himself, as great in
diplomacy as in war, it is true made himself rich beyond dreams,
though he was defrauded of his deserts, even as Columbus, Balboa, and
Pizarro were; but he was not wantonly cruel, and in the circumstances
in which he was placed it was difficult for him to have acted very
differently from what he did. It was not until the smaller men displaced
him and came to enrich themselves at any cost that his methods were
debased and degraded to vile ends and the policy itself was rendered
hateful.
Thus, whilst New Spain was always held to be nearer to the mother
country than any other American lands and more of a white man's
home than the settlements on the Southern Continent, the distrust
engendered by the ruthless cruelty of the earlier years