What Spain required now was a title such as the neighboring nations of Europe should recognize as valid. So far as the doctrine was concerned, of appropriating to themselves the possessions of others, they were all equally sound in it. Europe with her steel and saltpetre and magnetic needle was stronger than naked barbarians, whose possessions were thereupon seized as fast as found. The right to such robbery has been held sacred since the earliest records of the human race; and it was by this time legalized by the civilized nations. Savagism had no rights which civilization was bound to respect. The world belonged not to Christian or Mahometan, but to whatever idea, principle, or power could take it. In none of their pretended principles, in none of their codes of honor or ethics, was there any other ultimate appeal than brute force; their deity they made to fit the occasion, whatever that might be. This they did not know, however. They thought themselves patterns of justice and fair morality; and all that troubled them was in what attitude they would stand toward each other with regard to their several discoveries and conquests. But while such was the recognized condition of affairs at the beginning of the sixteenth century among the reckless adventurers of Spain, such were not the teachings of the Church, nor the views of the intelligent and right thinking men of the time. True, the army of fortune-seekers who first rushed to the new world in search of gold came for lust and plunder, but with them, and inspired with very different motives, came the missionaries of the cross, pointing the savages to civilization and a purer religion than their own. But civilization and religion, it must be confessed, had little to recommend them in the examples of unprincipled men who were ever present to give the lie to the teachings of the priests. [Sidenote: THE WORLD PARTITIONED BY THE POPE.]