In all active matters Columbus was what we call a lucky man.  It was luck that brought him to Guanahani; and throughout his life this element of good luck continually helped him.  He was lucky, that is to say, in his relation with inanimate things; but in his relations with men he was almost as consistently unlucky.  First of all he was probably a bad judge of men.  His humble origin and his lack of education naturally made him distrustful.  He trusted people whom he should have regarded with suspicion, and he was suspicious of those whom he ought to have known he could trust.  If people pleased him, he elevated them with absurd rapidity to stations far beyond their power to fill, and then wondered that they sometimes turned upon him; if they committed crimes against him, he either sought to regain their favour by forgiving them, or else dogged them with a nagging, sulky resentment, and expected every one else to punish them also.  He could manage men if he were in the midst of them; there was something winning as well as commanding about his actual presence, and those who were devoted to him would have served him to the death.  But when he was not on the spot all his machineries and affairs went to pieces; he had no true organising ability; no sooner did he take his hand off any affair for which he was responsible than it immediately came to confusion.  All these defects are to be attributed to his lack of education and knowledge of the world.  Mental discipline is absolutely necessary for a man who would discipline others; and knowledge of the world is essential for one who would successfully deal with men, and distinguish those whom he can from those whom he cannot trust.  Defects of this nature, which sometimes seem like flaws in the man’s character, may be set down to this one disability—­that he was not educated and was not by habit a man of the world.

All his sins of misgovernment, then, may be condoned on the ground that governing is a science, and that Columbus had never learned it.  What we do find, however, is that the inner light that had led him across the seas never burned clearly for him again, and was never his guide in the later part of his life.  Its radiance was quenched by the gleam of gold; for there is no doubt that Columbus was a victim of that baleful influence which has caused so much misery in this world.  He was greedy of gold for himself undoubtedly; but he was still more greedy of it for Spain.  It was his ambition to be the means of filling the coffers of the Spanish Sovereigns and so acquiring immense dignity and glory for himself.  He believed that gold was in itself a very precious and estimable thing; he knew that masses and candles could be bought for it, and very real spiritual privileges; and as he made blunder after blunder, and saw evil after evil heaping itself on his record in the New World, he became the more eager and frantic to acquire such a treasure of gold that it would wipe out the other evils of his administration.  And once involved in that circle, there was no help for him.