The expedition against the Araucanos inspired two other fine poems--that of Pedro de Ona, "Arauco Domado," written near the end of the century, and "Araucana," written by Diego de Santisteban, whose poem also saw the light before the seventeenth century opened. A fourth poet, Juan de Castellanos, better than either of these, wrote "Elegias de Varones Ilustres de Indias." He was a priest who had served in America, and who remembered some of the magnificent traits of the Indians that he had observed during his life among them, and made them the subject of his poetry. This was only the beginning of a serious Spanish-American literature, that has continued ever since. Father Charles Warren Currier, in a series of lectures at the Catholic Summer School three years ago, did not hesitate to say that the body of Spanish-American literature was much larger and much more important, and much more of it was destined to endure than of our English-American literature. In the light of what these Spaniards had done for education in their universities, and for the beauty of life in {339} their cities by their architecture, this is not so surprising a saying as it might otherwise be. All of these things stand together and are confirmations one of the other. The most interesting product of Spanish-American education, however,--the one which shows that it really stood for a higher civilization than ours,--remains to be spoken of. It consists of their treatment of the Indians. From the very beginning, as we have just shown, their literature in Spanish America did justice to the Indians. They saw his better traits. It is true they had a better class of Indians, as a rule, to deal with, but there is no doubt also that they did much to keep him on a higher level, while everything in North America that was done by the settlers was prone to reduce the native in the scale of civilization. He was taught the vices and not the virtues of civilization, and little was attempted to uplift him. Just as the literary men were interested in the better side of his character, so the Spanish-American scientists were interested in his folklore, in his medicine, in his arts and crafts, in his ethnology and anthropology--in a word, in all that North Americans have only come to be interested in during the nineteenth century. Books on all these subjects were published, and now constitute a precious fund of knowledge with regard to the aborigines that would have been lost only for the devotion of Spanish-American scholars.