Strange and devious are the paths of history.  Broad and shining channels get mysteriously silted up.  How many a time what seemed a glorious high road proves no more than a mule track or mere cul-de-sac.  Think of Canning’s flashing boast, when he insisted on the recognition of the Spanish republics in South America—­that he had called a new world into existence to redress the balance of the old.  This is one of the sayings—­of which sort many another might be found—­that make the fortune of a rhetorician, yet stand ill the wear and tear of time and circumstance.  The new world that Canning called into existence has so far turned out a scene of singular disenchantment.

Tho not without glimpses on occasion of that heroism and courage and even wisdom that are the attributes of man almost at the worst, the tale has been too much a tale of anarchy and disaster, still leaving a host of perplexities for statesmen both in America and Europe.  It has left also to students of a philosophic turn of mind one of the most interesting of all the problems to be found in the whole field of social, ecclesiastical, religious, and racial movement.  Why is it that we do not find in the south as we find in the north of this hemisphere a powerful federation—­a great Spanish-American people stretching from the Rio Grande to Cape Horn?  To answer that question would be to shed a flood of light upon many deep historic forces in the Old World, of which, after all, these movements of the New are but a prolongation and more manifest extension.

What more imposing phenomenon does history present to us than the rise of Spanish power to the pinnacle of greatness and glory in the sixteenth century?  The Mohammedans, after centuries of fierce and stubborn war, driven back; the whole peninsula brought under a single rule with a single creed; enormous acquisitions from the Netherlands of Naples, Sicily, the Canaries; France humbled, England menaced, settlements made in Asia and Northern Africa—­Spain in America become possessed of a vast continent and of more than one archipelago of splendid islands.  Yet before a century was over the sovereign majesty of Spain underwent a huge declension, the territory under her sway was contracted, the fabulous wealth of the mines of the New World had been wasted, agriculture and industry were ruined, her commerce passed into the hands of her rivals.

Let me digress one further moment.  We have a very sensible habit in the island whence I come, when our country misses fire, to say as little as we can, and sink the thing in patriotic oblivion.  It is rather startling to recall that less than a century ago England twice sent a military force to seize what is now Argentina.  Pride of race and hostile creed vehemently resisting, proved too much for us.  The two expeditions ended in failure, and nothing remains for the historian of to-day but to wonder what a difference it might have made to the temperate region of South America if the fortune of war had