and aqueducts.

The government of the Incas, the royal or ruling race, was a mild, parental autocracy.

Glowing reports of the enormous wealth of the Incas, the com monest articles in whose palaces, it was asserted, were of solid gold, reached the Spaniards by way of the Isthmus of Darien, and it was not long before an expedition was organized for the conquest of the country. The leader of the band was Francisco Pizarro, an iron-hearted, cruel, unscrupulous, perfidious, and illiterate adventurer.

It so happened that just at this time the kingdom of the Incas was weakened by internal dissensions. Two brothers, Huascar and Atahualpa by name, to whom their royal father had given the empire in equal shares, were engaged in civil war. The latter had defeated and was holding in captivity his brother, when Pizarro, advancing boldly into the country, with less than two hundred men, made, through treachery, a prisoner of Atahualpa right in the very presence of his army; and then, to strike terror into the minds of the natives, massacred a large number of them.

The captive Inca offered, as a ransom for his release, to fill the room in which he was confined "as high as he could reach" with vessels of gold. Pizarro accepted the offer, and the palaces and temples throughout the empire were stripped of their golden vessels, and the apartment was filled with the precious relics. The value of the treasure is estimated at over $17,000,000. When this vast wealth was once under the control of the Spaniards, they seized it all, and then treacherously put the Inca to death (1533).

With the death of Atahualpa the power of the Inca dynasty passed away forever; and within a few years after the Spaniards

at the present time only a fragment here and there bears evidence of the labor and care involved in their construction.

1 The populousness of the empire led to the careful cultivation of every patch of the mountain soil, the steep flanks of the hills being terraced as high up as vegetation flourishes. Irrigation was secured by means of an extensive Pystem of aqueducts and canals. Some of these conduits were from four hun1 to five hundred miles in length.

SPANISH COLONIZATION IN THE NEW world. 361

had first set foot upon the continent, all the extensive realms once embraced within the limits of the Peruvian monarchy had become a part of the domains of the Spanish king.1

Spanish Colonization in the New World. - Not until more than one hundred years after the discovery of the Western Hemisphere by Columbus, was there established a single permanent English settlement within the limits of what is now the United States, the portion of the New World destined to be taken pos session of by the peoples of Northern Europe, and to become the home of civil and religious freedom.

But into those parts of the new lands opened up by Spanish exploration and conquest there began to pour at once a tremendous stream of Spanish adventurers and colonists in search of fortune and fame. It was a sort of Spanish migration. What took place was something like the inrush of a Greek population into Western Asia after the Macedonian conquests, or like the influx of Roman traders and colonists into Gaul, Spain, and other countries opened up by the arms of Rome. Or, again, the movement might be compared to the rush of population from the Eastern States to California, after the announcement of the discovery there of gold, in 1848-9.

Upon the West India Islands, in Mexico, in Central America, all along the Pacific slope of the Andes, and everywhere upon the lofty and pleasant table-lands that had formed the heart of the empire of the Incas, there sprang up rapidly great cities as the centres of mining and agricultural industries, of commerce and of trade. Often, as in the case of Mexico, Quito, and Cuzco, these new cities were simply the renovated, enlarged, and rebuilt capitals or towns of the conquered natives; while in other in

1 For years, however, the empire was the scene of the most bitter rivalries and contentions among the adventurers who had conquered it, and others who, attracted by the stories of the wealth that had been found, crowded into the country to share the spoils. In one of these quarrels which arose between Pizarro and some of his officers, he was killed at Lima (which city he had founded), in the seventieth year of his age (1541).

stances, as in the case of Panama, Guayaquil, and Santiago, the Spanish cities were laid upon entirely new foundations.

Thus did a Greater Spain grow up in the New World. Before the close of the sixteenth century the dominions of the Spanish monarch in the Western Hemisphere formed of themselves a magnificent empire, and were the source, chiefly through the wealth of their gold and silver mines, of a vast revenue to the royal exchequer. It was, in a large measure, the treasures derived from these new possessions that enabled the sovereigns of Spain to play the imposing part they did in the affairs of Europe during the century following the discovery of America.1

Having thus hurriedly examined one source of Spanish greatness and reputation, it will be one of our aims in a following chapter to give some idea of the way in which this power and influence and prestige were used by the sovereigns of Spain in the maintenance of ecclesiastical and civil despotism.

1 After having robbed the Indians of their wealth in gold and silver, the 'slow accumulations of centuries, the Spaniards further enriched themselves by the enforced labor of the unfortunate natives. Unused to such toil as was exacted of them under the lash of worse than Egyptian task-masters, the Indians wasted away by millions in the mines of Mexico and Peru, and upon the sugar plantations of the West Indies. More than half of the native population of Peru is thought to have been consumed in the Peruvian mines. To save the Indians, negroes were introduced as a substitute for native laborers. This was the beginning of the African slave-trade in the New World. The traffic was especially encouraged by a benevolent priest named Las Casas (1474-1566), known as the "Apostle of the Indians." Thus the gigantic evil of African slavery in the Western Hemisphere, like the gladiatorial shows of the Romans, was brought into existence, or, rather, in its beginning was fostered, by a philanthropic desire and effort to mitigate human suffering.

(FROM THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA TO THE PEACE OF WESTPHALIA, IN 1648.)

CHAPTER I.

THE BEGINNINGS OF THE REFORMATION UNDER LUTHER.

Introductory. While Columbus and other adventurers were exploring the earth's unknown seas and opening up a New Hemisphere for civilization, the distinguished Copernicus was exploring the heavens and discovering the true system of the universe. Thus, at nearly the same time, were men's views of the earth and their conceptions of the heavens surprisingly modified and enlarged.

We bring together these great discoveries in the physical realm, in order simply to help the memory by connecting them with the far more significant discoveries made at about the same time in the spiritual world. The sixteenth century had but fairly opened when Luther discovered the New World of the Spirit, and by leading men out into its freedom ushered in a new age- the ever-memorable Era of the Protestant Reformation. The events of this new era we are now to study.

1 Nicholas Copernicus (1473-1543) had quite fully matured his heliocentric theory of the universe by the year 1507, but fearing the charge of heresy, he did not publish the great work embodying his views until thirty-six years later (in 1543).

The Reformation defined. The Reformation in its essential characteristics was a protest against the formalism and abuses, and a revolt against the authority, of the Roman Catholic Church.

Viewed as to the first essential, it was a renascence of primitive Christianity, and bore the same relation to mediæval Christianity that the classical revival bore to mediæval Scholasticism. Just as the Humanists charged the Schoolmen with having corrupted and misinterpreted the classical languages, literatures, and philosophy, and to sustain the indictment produced the original manuscripts; so did the reformers complain that the Roman Catholic Church had corrupted and made of none effect by its traditions and ceremonies the Word of God, and to prove the charge produced the original Hebrew and Greek Testaments. Thus the Reformation on this side was a movement of the human spirit seeking a purer and freer, a more personal and spiritual worship.

Viewed as to the second essential, it was an insurrection against Papal and priestly authority, a severance by half the nations of Europe of the bonds that united them to the ecclesiastical empire of Rome, and a transfer of their allegiance from the Church to the Bible. The decrees of Popes and the decisions of Councils were no longer to be regarded as having divine and binding force; the Scriptures alone were to be held as possessing divine and infallible authority, and this rule and standard of faith and belief the reformers were to interpret for themselves.

Extent of Rome's Spiritual Authority at the opening of the Sixteenth Century. In a preceding chapter on the Papacy it was shown how perfect at one time was the obedience of the West not only to the spiritual, but to the temporal, authority of the Pope. It was also shown how the Papal claim of the right to dictate in temporal or governmental affairs was practically rejected by the princes and sovereigns of Europe as early as the fourteenth century. But previous to the opening of the sixteenth century there had been comparatively few though there had been some, like the Albigenses in the south of France, the Wickliffites in England, and the Hussites in Bohemia - so hardy as to deny the supreme and