Sir Sidney Lee, the editor of the "National Dictionary of Biography of England," and the author of a series of works on Shakespeare, which has gained for him recognition as probably the best living authority on the history of the Elizabethan times, without deliberate intent, answered Draper almost directly, in the following paragraphs from his work, "The Call of The West," which appeared originally in Scribner's Magazine, but has since been published in book form. Since Mr. Lee cannot be suspected of national or creed affinities with the Spaniards, and his knowledge of the subject is unquestionable, his direct contradictions of Draper are all the more weighty:
"Especially has theological bias justified neglect or facilitated misconception of Spain's role in the sixteenth century drama of American history. Spain's initial adventures in the New World are often consciously or unconsciously overlooked or underrated, in order that she may figure on the stage of history as the benighted champion of a false and obsolete faith, which was vanquished under a divine protecting Providence by English defenders of the true religion. Many are the hostile critics who have painted sixteenth century Spain as the avaricious accumulator of American gold and silver, to which she had no right, as the monopolist of American trade, of which she robbed others, and as the oppressor and exterminator of the weak and innocent aborigines of the new continent, who deplored her presence among [{515}] them. Cruelty in all its hideous forms is, indeed, commonly set forth as Spain's only instrument of rule in her sixteenth century empire. On the other hand, the English adventurer has been credited by the same pens with a touching humanity, with the purest religious aspirations, with a romantic courage which was always at the disposal of the oppressed native.
"No such picture is recognized when we apply the touchstone of the oral traditions, printed books, maps, and manuscripts concerning America which circulated in Shakespeare's England. There a predilection for romantic adventure is found to sway the Spaniards in even greater degree than it swayed the Elizabethan Englishman. Religious zeal is seen to inspirit the Spaniards more constantly and conspicuously than it stimulated his English contemporary. The motives of each nation are barely distinguishable one from another. Neither deserves to be credited with any monopoly of virtue or vice. Above all, the study of contemporary authorities brings into a dazzling light, which illumes every corner of the picture, the commanding facts of the Spaniard's priority as explorer, as scientific navigator, as conqueror, as settler."
When an Englishman will admit this much in a comparison of his own countrymen with the Spaniards, it is easy to understand how great must be the actual historical contrast between the settlers of Spanish and English America.
Professor Draper's philosophy of history is, indeed, something to make one pause. He says on page 291, "The result of the Crusades had shaken the faith of all Christendom." As a matter of easily ascertainable history, the faith of Christendom was never so strong as during the century immediately following the Crusades. This was the thirteenth century, with the glorious Gothic cathedrals; the great Latin hymns; the magnificent musical development; the wondrous tribute of painting to religion, from Cimabue and Duccio to Giotto and Orcagna, and of sculpture from the Pisani to the great designers of some of the doors of the baptistry of Florence, of the finest arts and crafts in gold and silver, in woodwork, in needle-work, in illuminated books--all precious tributes to religious belief. In the hundred years after the Crusades, the Popes secured a position of influence in Europe greater than they had ever had before or have ever enjoyed since, which they used to secure the foundation of hospitals everywhere throughout Europe, the establishment of universities, the organization of religious orders for teaching and nursing purposes, and the finest development of social life and social happiness that the world had ever known.
According to Professor Draper, the removal of the Papal Court to Avignon in France gave opportunity for "the memorable intellectual movement that soon manifested itself in the great commercial [{516}] cities of Upper Italy." For him the earlier Renaissance begins with the fourteenth century, the thirteenth is entirely neglected, and a period that is really one of decadence is proclaimed a triumphant era of progress, because forsooth the removal from Rome of the Papacy and the abandonment by some of Christianity itself, gives him an opportunity to explain, thus from his prejudiced point of view, how the first stirrings of the Renaissance began. Verily indeed Professor Draper has written a joke book of history. Everything is along the same line. It is very rare, indeed, that by some chance he states a genuine historical truth, and when he does he usually disfigures it in some way or other. For him the Moors are the source of chivalry, of respect for women(!), and of the noble sentiment of personal honor. Everything else that is of any value in Christendom, must be referred to some source not Christian, lest by any chance religion should seem to have done any good in the world. And let us not forget that this book was taken seriously, and not by the ignorant, but by university men, college graduates, professors, and teachers in many parts of the country.
Above all Professor Draper can scarcely be too bitter in his denunciation of the way that the poor were imposed upon, their ignorance encouraged, their rights refused, and all opportunities denied them. All this was due, according to Professor Draper, to the tyranny of the Church. President Woodrow Wilson, after making a special study of that subject, suggested in a passage in his book, which may be found in "The New Freedom," exactly the opposite of this. He knew something of the subject. Professor Draper was quite sure that he knew all about it, and that no good could have possibly come out of the Church. President Wilson's expressions are interesting to those who do not know them:
"The only reason why government did not suffer dry rot in the Middle Ages under the aristocratic systems which then prevailed, was that the men who were efficient instruments of government were drawn from the Church--from that great Church, that body we now distinguish from other Church bodies as the Roman Catholic Church. The Roman Catholic Church then, as now, was a great democracy. There was no peasant so humble that he might not become a priest, and no priest so obscure that he might not become a Pope of Christendom, and every chancellory in Europe was ruled by those learned, trained and accomplished men--the priesthood of that great and then dominant Church; and so, what kept government alive in the Middle Ages was this constant rise of the sap from the bottom, from the rank and file of the great body of the people through the open channels of the Roman Catholic priesthood."
The greatest surprise is to be found in Professor Draper's ignorance of the history of his own profession. He says, "It had always been the policy of the Church to discourage the physician and his art; he interfered too much with the gifts and profits of the shrines." Professor Draper apparently knew nothing of the magnificent medical schools attached to the universities in the medieval period, whose professors wrote great medical and surgical text-books, which have come down to us, and whose faculties required a far higher standard of medical education than was demanded in America in Professor Draper's own day. For about 1871 anyone who wished might enter an American medical school practically anywhere in the country, without any preliminary education, and having taken two terms of ungraded lectures, that is, having listened to the same set of lectures two years in succession, might receive his degree of doctor of medicine. In the Middle Ages he could enter the medical school only after having completed three years of preliminary work in the undergraduate department, and then he was required to give four years to the study of medicine, and spend a year as assistant with another physician before he was allowed to practise for himself. This is the standard to which our university medical schools gradually climbed back at the beginning of the twentieth century--a full generation after Draper's time.
We know now that in those earlier centuries they had thorough clinical teaching in the hospitals, that is, physicians learned to practise medicine at the bedside of the patient, and not merely out of books and by theoretic lectures. Clinical teaching had not developed in Professor Draper's day to any extent. The medieval hospitals had trained nurses and magnificent quarters, while the trained nurse was only introduced into America in 1871, and our hospitals at that time were almost without exception a disgrace to civilization, according to our present standards of hospital construction. Our surgery was most discouraging, because there were so many deaths in the unclean hospital conditions. The medieval hospital surgeons operating under anesthesia, boasted of getting union by first intention, and were in many ways doing better work than their colleagues of 1870, Professor Draper's own time, before Lister's great discovery. Of all this Professor Draper had no inkling.