At the close of the eighteenth century Nicholas Masson de Morvilliers raised a hubbub in Europe by asking these two questions in the Encyclopédie Méthodique: “Mais que doit-on a I’Espagne? Et depuis deux siecles, depuis quatre, depuis six, qu’a-t-elle fait pour l’Europe?”

At the end of a century of positivistic philosophy and at the beginning of the industrial era this was a very logical question. It is true that Spain did not invent the locomotive, the telegraph, the telephone nor the modern frigidaire; but in the realm of human and eternal values could a more idiotic question have been asked? The metaphysics of Suarez, the international law of Victoria, the great theologians of the Council of Trent, Cano and Soto, had no value whatsoever for this Positivistic century; nor did the fact that Spain had produced one of the most human and original theatres with Lope de Vega, Calderón, Tirso de Molina and Alarcón; the greatest novel in the modern sense of the word, Don Quijote;the most profound satirist of all Europe, Quevedo; the outstanding moralist of the seventeenth century, Lorenzo Gracian; and above all these a school of mystics in Saint Teresa of Avila, Saint John of the Cross, Fray Luis de León and Juan de los Angeles, which has never been equaled. Even if Mr. Masson de Morvilliers could not see the importance of these contributions it is difficult to comprehend how he could ignore the transcendental fact that Spain had broken the columns of Hercules and had spread Mediterranean culture through the countries lying on the other side of the Atlantic and on the remotest shores of the Pacific.

The expulsion of the Society of Jesus from Spain and its colonies in 1767 was a serious blow to the missions in Mexico and in Central and South America. Not everywhere, however, did the disappearance of the Jesuit missionaries from the scenes of their labors result in the collapse of the missions. The Franciscans, who had been among the pioneer missionaries of Peru and had played a prominent part in carrying the Cross into the most remote wilds of South America, came to the rescue in many places, and, efficiently and successfully, carried on the work of their predecessors. This is true not only with regard to the chief aim of their missionary activity—the Christianization and civilization of their converts — but also with regard to the important task of geographical exploration. Eduard Pöppig, the pupil of the great Alexander von Humboldt, unquestionably a witness above suspicion, who, during his extensive voyages of discovery in South America from 1827 to 1832, followed the mission trails of the Franciscans in Peru, makes the following judgment on their activity: “However well the Jesuits contributed to the civilization of the plain Maynas, however untiring they have been in throwing the first light upon the geography of the confluences of the Marañón (that is, of that part of the Amazon which flows within the Peruvian borders), yet their endeavours are not without counterpart. The Franciscans, probably less favored by the circumstances of time, began their work almost a century later than the former, but the results of their labors, although they lie in ruins, were not smaller, and today still fill us with admiration.”

When, in the year 1670, Afonso Furtado de Castro do Rio de Mendonça became governor-general of Brazil, and assumed the responsibilities of the highest office in the colony, the search for El Dorado was already something of a recognized pursuit on the part of many government officials and of many enterprising colonists. The existence of rich deposits of gold, silver, and precious stones within the confines of Portuguese America was pretty generally taken for granted; and numerous people were periodically diverted from agriculture, which early formed the basis of much of colonial wealth, to follow the will-o’-the-wisp of hidden treasure into the wilderness. The appeal of the unknown was, of course, enormous, and the vision of El Dorado had become fixed in many minds, especially after the news of Spain’s good fortune in Peru and Terra Firma was spread. With geographical knowledge as piecemeal and as imperfect as it then was, it was no difficult matter for a credulous age to suppose that by penetrating the jungle areas westward from the sea the Portuguese might in some way tap the sources of Spain’s Andean mines.

It is not an easy matter to disentangle the motives lying back of any great enterprise such as the Spanish conquest and colonization in the Americas. The idea has been very generally held, even among historians, that the Spaniards were universally obsessed with a lust for gold, and however much or little other motives may have entered in, that this lust for gold was the motive above all others which inspired them to feats with few if any parallels in all history for courage and endurance and achievement. “Tell your master,” Cortés is reported to have said to the emissaries of Moctezuma, “that we Spaniards have a fever in our blood which can be cooled only by gold.”

The Mexican of today is proud of his Indian descent, and the heavy discount which he places on what the Spaniard has done for him is typified, for example, in the imposing statue to Cuauctemoc which was given one of the points of greatest prominence on the stately Paseo of Mexico City. One of the large bronze tablets on the base of that statue portrays Cortés and his captains putting the Aztec princes to the torture, roasting their feet to compel them to reveal their hidden treasure; and at that statue today centers the national Fiesta de la Raza.

It is with genuine pleasure that I bring to the founders of the Academy of American Franciscan History the good wishes and congratulations of the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

Having said this, and having said it with all the sincerity at my command, I ought, if a Spartan laconicism were proper, to sit down. The assembly will recognize, I am sure, that I am a pious fraud. I represent a novel and interesting version of what I may term invincible ignorance. I venture to address you as fellow students, but I do not dare to address you as fellow scholars, since this would either exalt me beyond my desert or degrade you below your merit. This Academy is being founded to recapture a tradition descending from the Middle Ages—and I am no mediaevalist, except in the sense that it was once said of a lady of uncertain time of life that around her hung the last enchantments of the middle ages. You are launching an historical venture, but I am, alas, only a dean, and no opinion is more universal in the learned world than that a dean, whatever lower virtues he may possess, is ipso facto no scholar. When the harassed chairman of an alumni club, in search of better oratory, wired the president of his alma mater to send him a good speaker, preferably a professor but certainly not lower than a dean, the president replied: “I am sending you two assistant professors. There is nothing lower than a dean.”

André Thevet, priest and friar, almoner to Catherine de Medici, cosmographer to four kings of France, is remembered by students of Brazilian history as one of the chroniclers of the unsuccessful attempt on the part of Nicolas Durand de Villegagnon (1510–1571) to found a French settlement in Rio bay. One might say that Thevet’s career was in a very real sense the product of the Christian humanism of the sixteenth century, and his life practically spanned those momentous one hundred years. Apparently of humble stock, he was born in the ancient town of Angoulême in 1502, almost at the time when Brazil was discovered. Of his early life and education virtually nothing is known, and a search for records made a number of years ago in his native city failed to disclose anything that might throw light on his first years.

The New World had hardly begun to fire the imagination of the Old before the Sons of Saint Francis, filled with a burning desire to spread the faith in the unknown lands in fulfillment of the biblical injunction “Go ye into the whole world and teach all nations” began their ceaseless peregrinations across two continents, from distant Canada and the forbidding Northwest to Tierra del Fuego and Patagonia in South America. In our own United States, dotting the land from Georgia to San Francisco, we find today the imposing ruins of Spanish missions built by their loving hands, their fervent faith, and their unequaled zeal.

On September 11, 1875, a select group of intellectuals met in the house of Don Alejandro Arango y Escandón. They came for the purpose of organizing and constituting in Mexico the Academia Mexicana Correspondiente de la Real Española. The group was made up of Don José María Bassoco, Don Alejandro Arango y Escandón, Don Casimiro del Collado, Don Francisco Pimentel, Don José Sebastián Segura, Don Manuel Peredo, Don José María Roa Barcena, Don Manuel Orozco y Berra, and Don Rafael Angel de la Peña. Also among them was a man in the prime of life : strong of body, with a kind but penetrating gaze, totally without affectation, yet extremely persuasive; his whole manner attractive and distinguished. What was he doing among all these others whom Fame had already made her chosen favorites, since this man always modestly recalled the fact that he had never had the opportunity of attending a public school? Yet that same gentleman was to become the very soul of this scholarly body, even though he insistently declared the contrary through the succeeding years; the succeeding years in which he was to mount that height in which his name would live both within and without our country from generation to generation. This genius in the world of letters was Don Joaquín García Icazbalceta.

The interpretation of Spanish colonial history has ever ranged to extremes. A political observer once remarked that on the subject of James G. Blaine men went crazy in pairs. And on the subject of Spain Spaniards have shown the same flair from Charles V to Franco. How else can we reconcile “the proud Spaniard” so fixed in popular psychology and the revealing verse of Batrina?

There is probably no more controversial issue in the United States today than that which is being debated, quite inaccurately, under the heading of “socialized medicine.” Public interest in the question has been crystallized by the introduction in the Congress of the United States of the Wagner-Murray-Dingell bill. At the same time, the champions of State sovereignty have prepared legislation aiming to provide medical care as well as hospitalization for low-income groups, without excessive extension of Federal power in a domain that touches intimately upon personal rights and local liberties.

Three centuries of fertile activity from San Fernando to Isabel la Católica place Spain in a prominent position among the nations of Europe. From being the source of revelation and interpretation of Eastern Culture, she becomes on the eve of the discovery of America, the disseminator of Western Culture.

At the end of the fifteenth century, Spain finds itself prepared to accomplish its high historic mission. Armed with a powerful Christian Faith, victorious in its secular struggle against the Moors, unified spiritually and politically, but nevertheless yearning for deeds of prowess and adventure, Spain feels the imperative necessity of spreading over the New World its spiritual abundance.

The novel Sab by Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda may be considered one of the outstanding products of her early Cuban environment. The work was begun in 1836 or earlier (while the author was traveling with her family to Spain), completed by 1838, and first published in 1841. In order to prepare the way for a favorable reception of the novel in her native land, as well as on the continent, la Avellaneda submitted the first ten chapters in 1839 to a “compatriota” residing in Sevilla:

In this era of Pan American enthusiasm, a more intimate knowledge of the careers of those statesmen whom the several countries hold in esteem should assist many who desire a truer understanding of our southern neighbors. Out of the welter of Latin American politics a few characters have emerged who are comparatively well known in English-speaking countries. But far more recognition than is generally accorded him is due to one who has evoked from his countrymen as well as from foreigners the most conflicting evaluations—Gabriel Garcia Moreno of Ecuador.

Two Poets, both laymen, stand out like brilliant stars on Mexico’s firmament, shedding the luster of the faith they loyally professed on the land they loved with equal loyalty, unfolding for Mexico’s glory the wealth of their poetic genius at a time when the storm clouds were gathering visibly and days of gloom and sorrow lowered over the Church and the faith to which their native land owed so much of her high and enviable culture. The two laymen in question are Manuel Carpio, who died in 1860, and José Joaquín Pesado, whose death occurred a year later. It is generally granted that Carpio and Pesado will always be cited in the history of Mexican literature as the leading revivers and exponents of classicism in their native land, without breaking away completely from the more popular and appealing forms of romanticism. It may be said that, as classicists, Carpio and Pesado took up and brought to fruition the movement begun by Martinez de Navarette and Sánchez de Tagle a half century earlier.

A Phase of American history that calls for a more adequate appraisal is the role played by Catholics in the cultural life of Mexico during the nineteenth century, from Hidalgo’s dash for independence in 1810 to the collapse of the Díaz regime in 1910. It is commonly believed that during these hundred years Catholics in Mexico were dolefully sitting on the sidelines and sucking their thumbs, wistfully waiting for a chance to enter once more and enrich with their contribution the temple of national culture. So many imagine that Catholics in nineteenth-century Mexico, being fettered politically and black-listed socially, manifested little interest and made no worthwhile contributions along cultural lines. Belonging generally to the so-called “conservative” party in the political arena, they are supposed to have been debarred from the cultured “liberal” circles of the day and for this reason remained inarticulate, contributing nothing of real importance and enduring value to the culture of independent Mexico and exerting no appreciable influence on contemporary literature, art, science, and education.

I Dedicate this article to the so-called Indigenists and Apristas, who, perhaps with very good intentions, preach the return to Indian primitivism. They advocate this, in the first place, without ever having lived the life of the Indian and secondly, with complete forgetfulness that the only thing that made men of the Indians was the doctrine of the gospel of Christ and that the only ones who understood the Indians were the Catholic missionaries.

I also want to emphasize the long and special preparation the missionaries underwent before attempting the conversion of millions of Indians, a fact which has not been stressed sufficiently in the works dedicated to this subject.

The same year (1565) in which the territory north of the Holy Gospel Province was made a separate Province, the Central American countries were separated from the Yucatan Province and organized into a new Province, that of the Most Holy Name. Ten years later, the latter was further divided, and the province of St. George was erected including Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. Honduras, which was made a Custody of St. George Province in 1587, was subsequently reunited with the Guatemala Province.

The perusal of some of the more recent publications in the field of philosophy that have come out of Mexico and South America, such as the works of Oswaldo Robles and P. Derisi, forces upon the North American reader the realization that the European philosophic tradition in the form of the philosophia perennis was firmly established on this continent several centuries before philosophy began to fulfill its vital function in the curricula of the colleges and universities of North America or, more exactly, 235 years before William Brattle offered the first course in philosophy at Harvard College.

A New era in the history of nineteenth-century Mexico began with the collapse of the Second Empire in 1867 and the re-founding of the Republic. Naturally, the first decade or so of this new era were years of transition. Then followed what is correctly termed the Díaz era, ending in 1910 with the overthrow of President Porfirio Díaz who for so many years, beginning in 1876, controlled the political affairs of Mexico and by his policy of peace, as González Peña points out, made it possible for Mexican literature to flower as it never had flowered before. For the Church, too, despite the existing “Reform” laws, the policy of Diaz meant comparative peace and greater freedom of action in promoting the common good of the nation. Correspondingly, as might be expected, Catholic “conservatives” in matters of religion began to feel more at ease also in the temple of Mexican culture and participated with renewed enthusiasm in the literary life of their native land.