The actual results, however, of the social policy of the Spanish kings fell far below the ideals they had set for themselves. The monarchic spirit of the crown was so strong that it crushed every healthy, expansive tendency in the new countries. It burdened the colonies with a numerous, privileged nobility, who congregated mostly in the larger towns and set to the rest of the colonists a pernicious example of idleness and luxury. In its zeal for the propagation of the Faith, the Crown constituted a powerfully endowed Church, which, while it did splendid service in converting and civilizing the natives, engrossed much of the land in the form of mainmort, and filled the new world with thousands of idle, unproductive, and often licentious friars. With an innate distrust and fear of individual initiative, it gave virtual omnipotence to royal officials and excluded all creoles from public employment. In this fashion was transferred to America the crushing political and ecclesiastical absolutism of the mother country. Self-reliance and independence of thought or action on the part of the creoles was discouraged, divisions and factions among them were encouraged and educational opportunities restricted, and the American-born Spaniards gradually sank into idleness and lethargy, indifferent to all but childish honours and distinctions and petty local jealousies. To make matters worse, many of the Spaniards who crossed the seas to the American colonies came not to colonize, not to trade or cultivate the soil, so much as to extract from the natives a tribute of gold and silver. The Indians, instead of being protected and civilized, were only too often reduced to serfdom and confined to a laborious routine for which they had neither the aptitude nor the strength; while the government at home was too distant to interfere effectively in their behalf. Driven by cruel taskmasters they died by thousands from exhaustion and despair, and in some places entirely disappeared.
The Crown of Castile, moreover, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries sought to extend Spanish commerce and monopolize all the treasure of the Indies by means of a rigid and complicated commercial system. Yet in the end it saw the trade of the New World pass into the hands of its rivals, its own marine reduced to a shadow of its former strength, its crews and its vessels supplied by merchants from foreign lands, and its riches diverted at their very source.