But nations like men must die. The full measure of prosperity had been meted out to Spain, and now she must lay it down—such is the inexorable law of progress. It was the very irony of autocracy, that one man should rule half the world! Spain's pyramid of greatness, which assumed such lofty proportions during the reign of their Catholic Majesties, culminated during the reigns of their immediate successors. A long line of ambitious and able princes had raised the empire to a giddy height; but with an illiterate and non-progressive populace, no sooner did the rulers become incompetent than the nation fell in pieces. In the height of his grandeur Spain's grandest monarch surfeited of success and abdicated; and with the death of his son Philip the glory of the empire departed. Then might her epitaph be written—Nine centuries of steady growth—a long and lusty youth, more than falls to the lot of most nations—and in three brief centuries more she rose, and ripened, and rotted.
It is not with death, however, but life, we have to do. Intellectual sparks were lighting up the dark corners of the earth, and a series of brilliant epochs began with the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella—modern Golden Ages they might be called. The golden age of Spain, dating from 1474 to 1516, was followed by Germany's golden age, which was during the reign of Charles V., 1519-1558. Then came England with the reign of Elizabeth, 1558-1603; then France under Louis XIV. and Louis XV., 1640-1740; Russia under Peter the Great, 1672-1725; and Prussia under Frederick the Great, 1740-1786. During this time European civilization was bursting its narrow confines and encircling the hitherto unknown world in every direction.
The Spaniards we would know and judge. We shall judge them, even though we know them not. We love to judge our fellows, and to think how much better are we than they. Little attention we give it, though it is a self-evident proposition, that to judge a people by any other standard than that to which they have been taught to conform is to do them great injustice. If we may believe psychology, thought, in its higher phases, develops only with the development of language; the conceptions of the mind can not rise much higher than forms of speech will enable it to express. Apply this postulate to the measure of character, and the corollary is, that to interpret fairly, we must restrict our imagination to such ideas, our mind to such beliefs, and our tongue to such formulas as belong to those we judge. This, however, is no easy matter. In the present age of intellectual progress and changing activity, when old delusions are being rapidly dispelled by science, and new discoveries are constantly opening new channels to distinction, it is almost impossible to place ourselves within the narrow limits of mediæval restrictions, in which thought and opinion were not allowed to germinate, but were passed unchanged from one generation to another. "It often happens," as John Stuart Mill remarks, "that the universal belief of one age of mankind—a belief from which no one was, nor, without an extra effort of genius or courage, could at that time be, free—becomes so palpable an absurdity, that the only difficulty then is to imagine how such a thing can ever have appeared credible." Not only were the Church dogmas of the Middle Age accepted as truth, but at that time to hold opinions antagonistic to established creeds was seldom so much as deemed possible.