[36] "They collected them into fixed habitations, gave them laws, introduced useful and polite arts among them; and, in short, of a barbarous nation, without civilised manners, and without religious principles, they made a good-natured and well-governed people, who strictly observed the Christian ceremonies" (De Bougainville, p. 98). [37] "These Indians live at present in an entire assurance, that whatever their priests advise them to is good, and whatever they reprehend is bad" (Ulloa, ii. 183). CHAPTER V THE SPANISH COLONIAL SYSTEM Colonies were one of the many new things which were introduced to Europe at the end of the fifteenth century. Of them mediæval Europe had known nothing since the dissolution of the Roman Empire; the means of communication were too bad, the Asiatic races were too powerful, and the Western world itself was too thinly populated to allow of distant excursions. The planting of settlements was familiar to both Greece and Rome. The Greek system was the simpler of the two, for the city state merely propagated itself by colonies as a plant propagates itself by seeds, and two cities existed instead of one, each independent of the other. But a Roman colony was incorporated as a subordinate and inferior part of the mother state. Greek history and literature were almost unknown in the Middle Ages, and even after the Renaissance they remained much less familiar than Latin. On the other hand, many European States, and especially Spain, inherited their law and their municipal systems from Rome, Latin was the international language, and the Church, by far the most powerful mediæval institution, was Roman. It is, therefore, not surprising that Spain followed the Roman colonial system, but all the circumstances were so different that beyond the mere incorporation and inferiority of the new dominions there was little other resemblance.