It is not surprising, then, that the Indian {340} himself, with all this interest in him, did not disappear, as in North America, but has remained to constitute the basis of South American peoples. If the South American peoples are behind our own in anything, it is because large elements in them have been raised from a state of semi-barbarism into civilization, while our people have all come from nations that were long civilized and we have none at all of the natives left. Wherever the English went always the aborigines disappeared before them. The story is the same in New Zealand and Australia as it is in North America, and it would be the same in India, only for the teeming millions that live in that peninsula, for whom Anglo-Saxon civilization has never meant an uplift in any sense of the word, but rather the contrary. The white man's burden has been to carry the Indian, instilling into him all the vices, until no longer he could cling to his shifty master and was shaken off to destruction. This story of the contrast of the treatment of the Indian at the North and the South is probably the best evidence for the real depth of culture that the magnificent education of the Spaniards, so early and so thoroughly organized in their colonies, accomplished for this continent. Alone it would stand as the highest possible evidence of the interest of the Spanish Government and the Spanish Church in the organization not only of education, but of government in such a way as to bring happiness and uplift for {341} both natives and colonists in the Spanish-American countries. Abuses there were, as there always will be where men are concerned and where a superior race comes in contact with an inferior. These abuses, however, were exceptions and not the rule. The policy instituted by the Spaniards and maintained in spite of the tendencies of men to degenerate into tyranny and misuse of the natives is well worthy of admiration. English-speaking history has known very little of it until comparatively recent years. Mr. Sidney Lee, the editor of the English Biographical Dictionary and the author of a series of works on Shakespeare which has gained for him recognition as probably the best living authority on the history of the Elizabethan times, wrote a series of articles which appeared in Scribner's last year on "The Call of the West." This was meant to undo much of the prejudice which exists in regard to Spanish colonization in this country and to mitigate the undue reverence in which the English explorers and colonists have been held by comparison. There seems every reason to think, then, that this newer, truer view of history is gradually going to find its way into circulation. In the meantime it is amusing to look back and realize how much prejudice has been allowed to warp English history in this matter, and how, as a consequence of the determined, deliberate efforts to blacken the Spanish name, we have had to accept as history exactly the opposite