To ignore the Latin-American is to be convicted of historical ignorance. From Dante to the great South American leaders and scholars of to-day the Latin races have been neither sleeping nor idle. During the last five hundred years more than one half of Western history has been made by Latin races. It was a Latin who discovered America. Another first sailed around the globe. Latin peoples explored, conquered, and settled both Western continents, and gave a language which has become the permanent speech of two thirds of the Western world. To call the roll of artists, painters, sculptors, poets, dramatists, novelists, musicians, explorers, missionaries, and scientists for the past five centuries is to prove that a majority of the names mentioned in the world's illustrious hall of fame are from Latin races. To mention Cure, Pasteur, and Marconi is to remind us of the scientific progress of modern Latin minds, and to speak of France and Italy as pioneers in democracy is to keep within the facts. It was in Italy that Browning and Tennyson and George Eliot and a host of other writers found inspiration and material to feed the fires of genius. Whatever may be said of the modern degeneracy of the dominant religious system of Latin-American countries, it is true that the sixteenth century saw in Spain one of the most virile and comprehensive missionary movements of all history. Never before nor since have missionary efforts been projected on so vast a scale or by so powerful procedure. Monks and priests went out and established the cross and the confessional through the Western world and in the islands of the sea, and, whatever else we may say, there can be no disparagement of the permanency of the results of these conquests. The Latin world is still dominantly Roman in its religious life, and shows very positive preferences for the religion of the conquistadores. To give a language and a religion to two thirds of the American continents is not the work of weaklings nor of degenerates.