Politically, after the downfall of the feudal system, ambitious princes, from the time of Alfonso X. to that of the Catholic Kings and of Charles V., enforced their royal authority in the Roman sense. These monarchs were Cæsars; they concentrated all the powers of the State in themselves; they centralised, unified, and legislated. This royal absolutism destroyed privilege and levelled mankind. A vast Spanish democracy was formed, subject to Cæsar, after the manner of the Roman people. The Latin sense of authority and law prevailed in the Spanish colonies; property was individual and absolute; civil equality obtained; in spite of racial differences, Indians and Spaniards were theoretically {286} on the same plane; the family, like the Roman _gens_, united slaves and children under the gloomy paternal power. The distant monarch was a formidable overlord, to whom viceroys and chapters, courts, judicial and ecclesiastical, addressed themselves to demand laws and regulations, penalties and sanctions. Catholicism was indissolubly bound up with the Roman authority of the laws; in Spain and America the prince was at the same time the shepherd of the Church. Religion was an instrument of political domination; it was an imperial force, a legacy of the Latin genius. It multiplied forms and rites; it disciplined the colonists, demanding outward obedience and uniformity of belief and manners. "The Roman Church," says Harnack, "is a juridical institution." Catholicism is also a social religion. In America it created the Brazilian nation in opposition to the Dutch peril; it founded republics among Indians inimical to all forms of organised social life; it extended the field of Latin endeavour, and from North to South favoured the constitution of new governments and societies. Under the double pressure of Roman Catholicism and legislation, America became Latinised. It learned to respect laws and forms, to submit to a religious as well as a civil discipline. French ideas, added to these influences, first prepared the way for the Revolution, and afterwards dominated the mind of America, from the Declaration of Independence to our own days.