No doubt South America has been more widely experimented upon in the colonizing sense than any other Continent.  The methods of the Spaniards and Portuguese were by no means similar throughout.  Indeed, the principles adopted by the four greatest colonizing nations of the age—­the Spanish, the Portuguese, the English, and the Dutch—­were all distinguished from each other by various important features.

The British, where they came into contact with dark-skinned races of inferior vigour and individual power, made a point of holding aloof, so far as the more important social points were concerned.  Thus in India and in Africa the gulf between the white and the black has continued unbridged.  The representatives of the British have remained as a governing race, relying upon the strict justice of their rule for its preservation.  They have refrained from interference in the thousand jealousies and caste regulations with which the East Indies were, and are, honeycombed, becoming active only when oppression became barefaced.  These officials, that is to say, have made a point of respecting the religions of the various tribes, and have even encouraged them to continue unmolested.

As a result, the Governors, as a body, won the respect, and even the reverence, of a great mass of the populace, but gained comparatively little actual and personal affection.  They were subjected to the jealousy of the fakirs in India, of the witch-doctors in Africa, and of other dusky fanatics who had been accustomed to oppress the rank and file of the populace before the advent of the European civilization.

The Dutch pursued a policy very similar to that of the English.  They were essentially just in their rule, and they won the wholesale respect of the subject races.  Their methods of governing, however, were usually more severe than those of the British, and as a rule the discipline they enforced was considerably stronger.  This has been evidenced in Africa and elsewhere.

The Iberian system of colonization was in general totally different.  Even the Spaniards, far less spontaneously genial than the Portuguese, encouraged an intimacy between their colonists and the subject races of a kind unknown in the Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic circles.  It is true that in the first instance the Spaniards slaughtered hundreds of thousands of natives.  But these wholesale killings were on account of no social convictions; they were merely the result of an overpowering greed for gold and of too harsh a method of enforcing labour.  The colour question, as between Spaniard and native, scarcely ruffled the social surface of the colonies.  This was not altogether to be wondered at when the antecedents of these bold Spanish colonial pioneers are taken into consideration.