new forces, and these not material.  And these alone will save her and save the world.  It is mournful to contemplate even the future magnificent material glories of America if these are not to be preserved, if these are to share the fate of ancient wonders.  It is obvious that the real glory of America is to be something entirely different from that of which the ancients boasted.  And this is to be moral and spiritual,—­that which the ancients lacked.

This leads me to speak of the moral consequences of the discovery of America,—­infinitely grander than any material wonders, of which the world has been full, of which every form of paganism has boasted, which nearly everywhere has perished, and which must necessarily perish everywhere, without new forces to preserve them.

In a moral point of view scarcely anything good immediately resulted, at least to Europe, by the discovery of America.  It excited the wildest spirit of adventure, the most unscrupulous cupidity, the most demoralizing speculation.  It created jealousies and wars.  The cruelties and injustices inflicted on the Indians were revolting.  Nothing in the annals of the world exceeds the wickedness of the Spaniards in the conquest of Peru and Mexico.  That conquest is the most dismal and least glorious in human history.  We see in it no poetry, or heroism, or necessity; we read of nothing but its crimes.  The Jesuits, in their missionary zeal, partly redeemed the cruelties; but they soon imposed a despotic yoke, and made their religion pay.  Monopolies scandalously increased, and the New World was regarded only as spoil.  The tone of moral feeling was lowered everywhere, for the nations were crazed with the hope of sudden accumulations.  Spain became enervated and demoralized.

On America itself the demoralization was even more marked.  There never was such a state of moral degradation in any Christian country as in South America.  Three centuries have passed, and the low state of morals continues.  Contrast Mexico and Peru with the United States, morally and intellectually.  What seeds of vice did not the Spaniards plant!  How the old natives melted away!

And then, to add to the moral evils attending colonization, was the introduction of African slaves, especially in the West Indies and the Southern States of North America.  Christendom seems to have lost the sense of morality.  Slavery more than counterbalances all other advantages together.  It was the stain of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  Not merely slaves, but the slave-trade, increase the horrors of the frightful picture.  America became associated, in the minds of Europeans, with gold-hunting, slavery, and cruelty to Indians.  Better that the country had remained undiscovered than that such vices and miseries should be introduced into the most fertile parts of the New World.