Democratic Sentinel, Volume 16, Number 44, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 18 November 1892 — ONE HUNDRED STANLEYS IN A CENTURY. [ARTICLE]

ONE HUNDRED STANLEYS IN A CENTURY.

A Plea for Justice to the Early Spanish Pioneers. The World’s Columbian Exposition ought to teach us many great lessons; but the best it can teach us is justice to American history. We have two things to learn. First, that the pioneering of American history was a national achievement absolutely unique in the world’s history. And second, that one did not do it. No other nation in any time or land has ever made such a record in sustaining heroism and endured hardship, in area of exploration, in tenacity of occupation, in conquest at once so soldierly and so humane; nor was ever a nation so ill repaid in the gratitude of its beneficiaries. And that record was the record of the Spaniard. Justice to Spain has never become general among us. That early Spanish spirit of finding out was almost superhuman. No other mother ever bore 100 Stanleys in one* century. A poor Spanish lieutenant with twenty men had pierced a continental desert and looked down into the sublimest wonder of the world, the Grand Canon of the Colorado—three full centuries before a Saxon eye ever saw it; and that was a fair but un prominent sample of the truth from Cape Horn to Colorado. No where else has a savage world found such noble mercy at the hands of its conquerors. We have wiped the aborigine from off his own state; the Spaniard kept him alive and improved him. The Indian throughout Spanish-America is to-day more numerous than in 1402, and is a now man. There was no politics in the Spanish-American policy. From first to last, from 1490 to 1821, it has been permanent, unchanging, all comprehensive, just, humane, manly; the only noble Indian policy of all time. And yet we have been taught to believe that the history of Spain in America was a bloody and cruel one. There wore, of course, Spanish brutes, as well as other brutes, though not so commonly—and individual acts of cruelty. But the laws of Spain know no pets, and injustice was punished. I cannot recall that England ever administered punishment for such an offense. That later days have reversed the situation has nothing to do with the obligation of American history to do justice to the past. Why is Spain weak to-day? Why is she a drono as compared with the young giant of nations that has grown since nor day in the empire she opened? Simply because sho spent herself in that gigantic effort, peerloss in history. She was chivalric and not commercial. England never paid any attention to the Now World until it began to figure as a “business opening.”—[Charles F. Lummis.