Not so has it been with Spain. Unlike all other nations in all other respects, she could not allow herself to resemble them even in the matter of making sacrifices to Mutability. Had Juan Ponce de Leon been so unlucky as to find the Fountain of Youth, and had he been so unwise as to reserve its waters for his own private washing and drinking, and so have lived from the age of American discovery to the age of American secession, he would, as a Spaniard, have been forced to undergo many mortifications in the course of the dozen generations that he would then have survived beyond his originally appointed time. Spain has been a greater country than any other in Europe, but she has experienced greater changes than any other European country. She has never known such a catastrophe as that which befell France in the early part of our century, but her losses have been far beyond those which France has ever met with. It was the lot of France to fall at once, to pass from the highest place in the world to the lowest at one step, to abdicate her hegemony with something of that rapidity which is common in dreams, but which is of rare occurrence in real life. It has been the lot of Spain to perish by the dry rot, and to lose imperial positions through the operation of internal causes. So situated as to be almost beyond the reach of effective foreign attack, Spain has had to contend against the processes of domestic decay more than any other leading nation of modern times. To these she has often had to succumb, but she has never failed in due time to redeem herself, and, after having been a by-word for imbecility, to rise again to a commanding place. Three times in less than three centuries have the Spaniards fallen so low as to become of less account in the European system than the feeblest of the Northern peoples; and on each occasion has the native, inherent vigor of the race enabled it to astonish mankind by entering again upon the career of greatness, not always, it must be allowed, after the wisest fashion, but so as to testify to the continued existence of those high qualities which made the Castilian the Roman of the sixteenth century.