MINUTE

Press, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 25264, 16 August 1947, Page 7

MINUTE

WELL? Was there in history a more colossal failure? But measure events by standards other than political and economic; think of a whole continent effectively assimilated to a European civilisation and life, without sacrificing the native population in the process nor leaving it outside of it, so far as it depended on lhe newcomers; of an absorption into the ways of Europe which enabled European forms of life to pass into the hands of peoples as far from Europe as the Aztecs of Mexico, the Incas of Peru, and even the Tagalog of the Philippines (the only truly Europeanised Asiatics, by the way); consider that, as early as the sixteenth century, the Indies had already contributed to our Atlantic world a school of painting in Cuzco, and a dance, the Chaconne, which Bach thought worthy of his music; gauge the depth, colour, richness of the spiritual tradition Spain has left from Manila to San Domingo and from California to Tierra de Fuego; bear in mind that in the United States the scanty remains of Spanish civilisation, a gate here and an arch there and the square cloister of a mission yonder, are treasured and starred in travel books, and that New Orleans is proud of her Spanish air and that Spanish buildings grace the whole continent and that the language remains alive with the ways of thinking it breeds and that the whole people wno speak it learn with it the value of leisure and the sense of passive resistance to that insidious enemy, the State, particularly the good State—and well, was it so bad? —SALVADOR DE MADARIAGA: “The Rise of the Spanish American Empire."