I.
THE SPANIARDS.
AN HISTORIC ERA.
"And from America the golden fleece
That yearly stuffs old Philip's treasury."
Marlowe's Faustus.
The story we have to tell was the problem of the sixteenth century, and is no less the marvel of the nineteenth. Put in the simplest possible form, the riddle to be solved in every palace of Christendom was, "How is the discovery of a new world going to affect mankind?"
SPANISH ARMS.